You have likely heard: The Republican majorities in Congress, after a few weeks of back-and-forth where it seemed like Trump’s mass MAGA budget bill was actually at risk of failing, voted up the so-called “big, beautiful bill” by the slimmest of possible margins.
You’ve also likely heard: Some of the most consequential aspects of the megabill—particularly the cuts Democrats focused on most—involve slashing bedrock social safety net programs such as SNAP food assistance and Medicare, all in order to provide huge benefits to the wealthiest individuals and corporations, as recently reported by Epicenter’s Ambar Castillo. This all will likely hit rural states the hardest, though certainly every state in the nation will be affected, including New York.
But there’s more: A U-turn on climate policy
Some aspects of the bill did not receive quite as much attention, but will still have huge implications for the country and our state. The first is climate and energy, mainly because this soon-to-be-law takes a sledgehammer to many of the climate-oriented achievements of the Biden administration. That includes:
- Demolishing tax credits for those buying electric vehicles;
- Reducing incentives to install alternative climate systems such as solar panels and developing green energy projects. (In a marker of just how ideologically stringent the opposition to clean energy was, an earlier version of the bill would have forced the USPS to sell off all 7,200 of its just-bought electric delivery vehicles.)
We’re not talking small-ball here. One analysis by the Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research found there were some half a trillion dollars in green energy investments that have been announced but have not come online, all of which now stands on uncertain footing with the evaporation of tax incentives. As that and other analyses point out, this is not just investment but manufacturing and jobs — tens of thousands of them. This is one of the most significant growth sectors in contemporary manufacturing, which is something that Trump is supposed to care about.
Of course, the reason that climate has loomed so large over our contemporary society is not just because of the jobs, but the extreme impacts of climate change. Doing a heel turn on the path toward American energy independence fueled by renewable and alternative energy is another setback for global efforts to rein in the most acute effects. Not to mention that the bill itself also axes some of the tools to actually contend with those effects; infamously, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz acted to strip out funding for weather forecasting just in advance of deadly flooding in the state that killed over 100 people, which was partly blamed on a lack of advanced notice from federal forecasting authorities.
Funding for ICE tops more than most countries’ military
Another effect of the bill, which happens to be related to my particular area of longtime expertise, is “immigration” enforcement. I put immigration in quotes because, as I have been writing with some regularity in the months of the second Trump term, the notion of this all being primarily about immigration itself is a pretext for what is a broader project of increasing the reach and scope of government surveillance, detention, and enforcement along axes that include immigration, but also the policing of political speech and activity. As I wrote last week, the administration is signaling pretty heavily that it intends to use the immigration enforcement apparatus to go after U.S. citizens, particularly those that dare to publicly or forcefully oppose Trump.
The main thing I want to emphasize about the level of funding and resources for ICE, CBP and the rest of this secret police infrastructure is its gargantuan scale. These have long been large and lavishly funded entities — under both Republican and Democratic presidents and congresses — but we are talking about a different order of magnitude here, which would make ICE individually better funded than the majority of global militaries. This will put the agency at a funding level that will exceed all other federal law enforcement functions combined, including the entire Bureau of Prisons, the FBI, DEA, ATF and IRS enforcement.
As I and others have long noted, there simply aren’t enough so-called criminal aliens in the United States to justify even a small fraction of this expenditure and detention capacity, which is a very obvious indicator that targets are not going to be the purported criminals that Trump ran on apprehending. Already, we know that over nine out of every 10 people ICE has apprehended in recent months do not have violent criminal records, and others that do have records often have those that are associated directly with their immigration status, like driving without a license in jurisdictions where they can’t get a license at all.
Make no mistake: We are entering a police state
I am not saying so lightly when I worry that there is a direct line between this outsized resource allocation and the emergence of a full-fledged authoritarian police state in the United States. If you were already worried or appalled over widely-reported tactics like federal agents in combat fatigues and masks with no identifiable insignia or warrants showing up to raid random businesses with guns drawn or detaining people explicitly over political speech, we have now effectively given the government the functional capability to do this all tenfold.
Still, I try not to be fatalistic without some sense of how we may get out of the woods, and what I can say here is that it is only becoming more and more important for you to care about what’s happening at the local level. At this point, your own city and state elected leaders and officials are going to be one of the main barriers standing between you and an incredibly aggressive and empowered federal authoritarian administration, which means that you should be paying attention to what exactly it is that they are saying and planning when it comes to safeguarding your rights and civil liberties.
That’s not to say that all of these issues should necessarily supersede what matters at the local level — Zohran Mamdani arguably won his upset victory in the Democratic mayoral primary as a result of a clear and consistent focus on local affordability, even as many of his opponents tried to make the race about external factors such as his views on pro-Palestinian slogans — but we are probably reaching a point where questions like “Will you allow masked federal agents to drag away local organizers?” are real and important.
I could fill a column 10 times this size and not touch on everything that was wrong with this behemoth legislation, which even many policymakers acknowledged they did not fully read or necessarily comprehend. There are tons of bizarre little provisions, like one prohibiting state regulation of artificial intelligence and another axing sales taxes on gun silencers. One thing that is crystal clear: This bill was not just another piece of legislation or a standard-issue budget. It will shape the fabric of American society for the months and years to come.
