Editor’s Note: This article was published as part of the inaugural edition of The Commonwealth Times and reflects events as reported at the time of the referenced news coverage.
There are moments in the life of a republic when a single piece of legislation reveals, with uncomfortable clarity, the governing philosophy of those who hold power. The budget reconciliation bill now advancing through Congress is such a moment. It is not merely a fiscal document; it is a declaration of values, a redistribution of obligation, and a test of whether the social compact that has undergirded American governance since the New Deal can survive the arithmetic of ideology dressed as austerity.
The measure, which House Republicans pushed through the Budget Committee in early 2025 and which has continued to evolve through conference negotiations into 2026, proposes to cut more than $800 billion from Medicaid over the coming decade, restructure eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in ways projected to remove millions from the rolls, and simultaneously make permanent the individual and corporate tax provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — provisions that, absent extension, would begin expiring at the end of 2025. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the full extension of those tax cuts would add approximately $4.6 trillion to the federal deficit over ten years, a figure that renders the purported savings from safety-net reductions not merely insufficient but almost irrelevant as a matter of deficit reduction.
This is the central contradiction that proponents of the bill have yet to resolve in honest terms. The rhetoric of fiscal responsibility — the urgent invocation of a $36 trillion national debt — is deployed to justify the contraction of programs that serve the elderly in nursing homes, children in low-income households, and working adults whose employers do not provide health insurance. Yet that same rhetoric evaporates when the conversation turns to revenue. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and lowered marginal rates across income brackets, with the largest absolute benefits flowing to households earning above $400,000 annually, according to the Tax Policy Center’s distributional analyses. To make these provisions permanent while claiming the mantle of fiscal discipline is not governance; it is prestidigitation.
The Medicaid cuts deserve particular scrutiny, for they would fall upon a program that covers more than 90 million Americans — roughly one in four citizens of this republic. Medicaid is not, as its detractors sometimes suggest, a program exclusively for the able-bodied and idle. It is the single largest payer of long-term care services in the United States. It covers approximately 40 percent of all births. It provides behavioral health services to millions struggling with the opioid and fentanyl crises that have ravaged communities from Appalachia to the rural Midwest — communities, it must be noted, that vote overwhelmingly for the very legislators now proposing these reductions. The proposed work requirements, income verification frameworks, and per-capita cap structures would, according to analyses from the Kaiser Family Foundation, disproportionately affect states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, many of them governed by Republicans.
The food assistance provisions follow a similar logic of administrative burden as deterrence. The bill proposes to tighten SNAP eligibility for able-bodied adults without dependents, to expand work-reporting requirements, and to reduce categorical eligibility provisions that allow states to align SNAP with other assistance programs. The USDA’s own data show that the average SNAP benefit amounts to roughly $6.20 per person per day. The notion that this modest provision — less than the cost of a single sandwich at most American restaurants — represents a significant driver of federal insolvency, or a meaningful inducement to idleness, does not survive contact with empirical reality.
Proponents of the legislation argue, not without some foundation, that entitlement spending on its current trajectory is unsustainable, that Medicaid’s growth rate has outpaced inflation and population growth for decades, and that the tax cuts have generated economic activity that partially offsets their static revenue cost. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and his allies have framed the bill as essential to preserving economic competitiveness and averting a fiscal deterioration that would ultimately harm the very populations that safety-net programs serve. There is a version of this argument that deserves engagement: the question of how a nation funds its obligations in an era of rising interest payments, demographic transition, and global competition is genuine and urgent.
But a serious engagement with that question would require confronting the revenue side of the ledger with the same rigor applied to the expenditure side. It would require acknowledging, as the CBO has repeatedly documented, that the 2017 tax cuts did not pay for themselves through economic growth — that actual revenues fell below pre-TCJA projections in every year following enactment. It would require grappling with the fact that corporate tax receipts as a share of GDP have fallen to historic lows, that the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans — when unrealized capital gains and pass-through structures are accounted for — is often lower than that paid by middle-income wage earners. A reconciliation bill that addressed these realities while also reforming entitlement programs to ensure their solvency might constitute genuine fiscal responsibility. The bill before Congress does no such thing.
The procedural vehicle itself merits comment. Budget reconciliation, a process created by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, allows legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority, bypassing the filibuster. It was designed for narrow budgetary adjustments. Its use to effectuate a fundamental reordering of the relationship between the federal government and tens of millions of its citizens — without the deliberation that such a transformation demands, without the bipartisan negotiation that characterized prior entitlement reforms under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton alike — represents a degradation of institutional norms that should trouble legislators of any partisan allegiance.
The human consequences of these proposed cuts are not abstractions. The American Hospital Association has warned that Medicaid reductions on this scale would force hospital closures in rural areas already struggling with access to care. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that millions of children would lose health coverage. Food banks across the country, already strained by post-pandemic demand and the expiration of enhanced benefits, have testified that SNAP cuts would produce cascading effects on hunger and nutritional outcomes in low-income communities. These are not speculative harms; they are the predictable, documented consequences of policy choices made in the name of a fiscal discipline that is applied with conspicuous selectivity.
Let it be stated plainly: a nation that can afford to forgo $4.6 trillion in revenue to preserve tax reductions whose benefits accrue disproportionately to its wealthiest citizens can afford to feed its children and provide medical care to its elderly. The question is not one of capacity but of will, not of economics but of morality. The reconciliation bill before Congress does not merely propose a different allocation of resources; it proposes a different vision of what this republic owes to those who, by circumstance of birth, health, or fortune, find themselves in need of its assistance.
The architects of this legislation will answer, as they have in every era, that the market will provide, that private charity will fill the gap, that economic growth will lift all vessels. History offers a less sanguine assessment. The period before the New Deal, before Medicaid, before food assistance programs, was not characterized by widespread private benevolence meeting the needs of the destitute. It was characterized by poorhouses, by child malnutrition rates that would shock the modern conscience, by elderly Americans dying in penury. The safety net exists because the alternative was tried and found not merely wanting but unconscionable.
As this bill moves toward what its sponsors hope will be final passage, the citizens of this republic are entitled to demand clarity from their representatives. Not the clarity of slogans — not ‘fiscal responsibility’ untethered from revenue realities, not ‘personal responsibility’ imposed upon those least equipped to bear it — but the clarity of honest accounting. What kind of nation do we propose to be? For whom does this government exist? These are the questions that reconciliation, in its truest sense, requires us to answer.