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Page 67 of 496
No. 144
Filed JULY 4, 2025
Economy & Trade
Second Term

Trump Signs 'One Big Beautiful Bill' Into Law On Fourth Of July, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That 17 Million Low-Income Americans Were Receiving Health Coverage Through The Federal Government

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald Trump on Friday signed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" into law during an Independence Day ceremony on the White House South Lawn, capping a six-month legislative push to make permanent the 2017 tax cuts widely understood to have primarily benefited the wealthiest Americans, while reducing federal Medicaid spending by an estimated $700 billion to $1 trillion over the next decade.

The bill, which the President personally named and which he described in remarks as both "big" and "beautiful," extends individual income tax rates set to expire at the end of 2025, makes permanent the doubled estate tax exemption protecting inheritances of up to roughly $14 million per person, and adds further reductions skewed toward top earners. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the package will add between $3 trillion and $4 trillion to the federal deficit over ten years, a figure the Treasury Department promised to address in a forthcoming plan it has not yet drafted.

"This is the biggest, most beautiful tax cut in the history of our country, and the people who got it really deserved it, OK," Trump told an invited audience that included Republican congressional leadership, oil and gas executives, and a number of pass-through partnership owners personally protected by the preserved Section 199A deduction. "Some people are going to lose a little healthcare. That's how it works. They were probably going to lose it anyway."

The bill's Medicaid provisions, which impose new work requirements, tighten eligibility verification, and reduce federal matching rates for several expansion states, are projected by CBO to result in between 10 million and 17 million Americans losing health coverage by 2034. The legislation also cuts approximately $230 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the same period, transferring substantial administrative costs to state governments now required to verify the employment status of recipients twice annually using systems that, in many states, do not currently exist.

A senior administration official, speaking on background, told reporters that the Independence Day signing was intended to underscore "the deep patriotic resonance of permanently lowering top marginal rates," and that the President had personally requested the July 4 date in part because he considered it "more presidential than any other day on the calendar," and in part because it gave guests a generous head start on the evening's fireworks. The same official confirmed that working-class provisions advertised during the bill's negotiation, including a no-tax-on-tips deduction and an expanded standard deduction, were structured to phase out before the bill's permanent provisions took full effect.

At press time, the White House Counsel's Office was finalizing draft guidance intended to clarify which Americans qualified as the kind of Americans the bill was designed to help.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment
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