Photo: Bjoertvedt, Wikimedia Commons
The budget reconciliation bill is now working its way through Congress, and what President Trump calls the “big, beautiful bill” has a lot of ugly provisions in it.
Among those ugly provisions are sweeping attacks on federal agencies and their ability to carry out their responsibilities under the law to protect the health and safety of the American public.
These provisions borrow from previous legislation that never made it into law, and so far they have received relatively little public attention compared to other parts of the budget reconciliation bill.
If signed into law, they would erect nearly insurmountable procedural hurdles to maintaining our existing health and environmental protections, and to establishing new ones. Safeguards that Americans rely on every day – from air quality standards to food and product safety regulations – are all at risk.
In addition to being harmful and misguided public policy, these provisions have no place in a budget reconciliation bill – which is supposed to include only provisions that are primarily intended to affect spending or revenues. Because the harmful policy impacts of the provisions are the intent and the budgetary impact is incidental – and far outweighed by the damage that would result –the House’s attempt to shoehorn these provisions into the budget reconciliation bill is an end-run around Congress’s own rules.
Here are some of those provisions:
