Explaining the Timeline of Donald Trump’s Big Dumb Budget Bill
Now is not the time to panic, friends.
A little less than a week ago, Donald Trump pulled off a bit of an unfortunate victory with the passage of his Big, “Beautiful” Bill. It took a lot of discussion, wheelin’, dealin’, revisions from the Senate, and acts of blatant hypocrisy to get there, but on the 4th of July, while the nation was mourning the horrific tragedy in Kerr County, TX, of the freak flash floods that took the lives of at least 82 people (while I write this Monday evening), Trump signed the monstrosity into law.
Right away, something happened I’m sure all of you can relate to: panic set in. Doomsday texts from our relatives who are afraid they’re about to be stripped of their Medicaid. Seemingly hopeless prayers for our immigrant brothers and sisters as ICE is given more money than they’ve seemingly ever been given before. There was an overall sense of doom and gloom in chats across America as folks began to resign themselves to a substantially worse country than the one they’d been in even one day prior.
Friends, things aren’t looking too promising regarding the bill, but there are two things I want this article to do for you: provide a timeline for WHEN the separate parts of the bill go into effect, and dispel some of the misinformation floating around about the bill. Because it’s always been my belief that operating from a place of fear is not only counterproductive to all of us - it’s counteractive to our own mental health. And thankfully, much of the bill will NOT go into effect right away - and many of the worst things you’ve heard about it are exaggerated or simply untrue. For example:
MEDICAID:
One of the most discussed portions of the bill, as well as one of its most controversial, are its changes to Medicaid. It’s been estimated by the Congressional Budget Office that as many as 16 million people are going to lose their health insurance coverage by 2034, but what does that mean? Well for starters, there’s an expansion of work requirements for the program, with adults between the ages of 19 and 64 now needing to work a minimum of 80 hours per month to qualify for Medicaid, except under certain exemptions.
WHEN DOES IT GO INTO EFFECT?:
2028; however, some of the work requirements are going to begin by “no later than December 31, 2026.”
SNAP:
SNAP recipients are ALSO subject to work requirements now, with many adults previously having had to work until the age of 54 to qualify for SNAP unless they were a parent (and the children were dependents). That’s changed now; the age is 64, and if you’re looking for an exemption as a parent, only 14-year-old children or younger qualify. Other exemptions: people that are “medically certified as physically or mentally unfit for employment,” pregnant women, and people defined under the Indian Health Care Improvement Act as an “Indian or an Urban Indian [or] a California Indian.”
States will also now be hit with a penalty system: should a “payment error rate of 6 percent or higher” be found statewide, the state will be slapped with as much as 15 percent of the total costs of the SNAP budget. It’s worth noting that any state with a payment error rate of 13.34 or higher can delay payment for two years.
WHEN DOES IT GO INTO EFFECT?:
It’s not clear when the work requirements go into effect, but the rest of the law goes into effect in 2028.
STUDENT LOAN REPAYMENT:
So long, SAVE, Income Contingent Repayment, Pay As You Earn, and Graduate PLUS plans. We now have two plans: the Repayment Assistance Plan and the standard repayment plan. There are also now borrowing caps on student loans, with $100,000 for most grad students and $200,000 for law and medical students, with Parent PLUS loans now capped at $65,000. If you’re an undergrad student, Stafford loans are capped.
OH! And no more deferment for financial hardship. Thanks, Donald.
WHEN DOES IT GO INTO EFFECT?:
July 2026.
GREEN ENERGY:
There’s an absolutely insane amount of green energy elimination within this bill. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives for clean energy and energy efficiency are gone. $7,500 tax credits for electric vehicles are gone starting as soon as September 30, 2025. $3,200 tax credits for any Americans committed to energy-improvement changes within the home? Gone by 2026. Tax credits for Americans buying solar panels or other clean energy sources for their home? Gone. And maybe most tragically, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a financing for any emissions-reduction projects, is dead after this year (though any projects currently funded by the program remain).
If you want to see just how much this bill is “fuck green energy,” I advise you to read the bill for yourself. I want to present a brief passage from the section titled “TITLE VI--COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS.”
SEC. 60001. RESCISSION OF FUNDING FOR CLEAN HEAVY-DUTY VEHICLES. The unobligated balances of amounts made available to carry out section 132 of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7432) are rescinded.
SEC. 60002. REPEAL OF GREENHOUSE GAS REDUCTION FUND.
Section 134 of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. 7434) is repealed and the unobligated balances of amounts made available to carry out that section (as in effect on the day before the date of enactment of this Act) are rescinded.
SEC. 60003. RESCISSION OF FUNDING FOR DIESEL EMISSIONS REDUCTIONS.
The unobligated balances of amounts made available to carry out section 60104 of Public Law 117-169 (136 Stat. 2067) are rescinded.
That goes on twenty-one more times for twenty-one more rescissions, ensuring that the entire Committee on Environment and Public Works goes unfunded.
Well… except for section 60025…
SEC. 60025. JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS.
(a) In General.--In addition to amounts otherwise available, there is appropriated for fiscal year 2025, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, $256,657,000, to remain available until September 30, 2029, for necessary expenses for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures of the building and site of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
(b) Administrative Costs.--Of the amounts made available under subsection (a), not more than 3 percent may be used for administrative costs necessary to carry out this section.
So: green energy out. Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center renovations? IN, BABY.
WHEN DOES THIS GO INTO EFFECT?
In seemingly all cases, immediately.
TAX POLICY:
According to the White House, the tax policy within the bill has always been the bread and butter of this bill: the primary reason for its existence, with a plan to make Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent (even though over a third of its cuts affected higher income households (or maybe ESPECIALLY because)). That act was set to expire this year, but they are indeed now permanent - AND expanded.
Changes include:
A change to the US tax code, known as the State and Local Taxes deduction, which allows taxpayers to deduct property taxes and other local taxes from their federal tax returns. Before, you could deduct up to $10,000 of these taxes; for the following five years, that amount is $40,000.
Income from tips and overtime may be deducted until 2028.
This is for less than $25,000 total in tips, and $12,500 of overtime pay
Interest paid on car loans (for cars made in the US) can be deducted until 2028.
Estate tax exemption is raised to $15 million for single filers, and $30 million for married couples.
A one-time (permanent) addition of $750 (or $1,500 for couples) to the standard deduction, starting in the filing year of 2026
Americans in higher-tax states like California and New York receive larger income tax deductions on both a state and local level (aka SALT) from this year through 2028
The child tax credit is now $2,200 for every child that qualifies, adjusted for inflation next year.
There’s also a bizarre section on “limitation on wagering losses,” aka gambling losses, where only 90 percent of one’s gambling losses can be deducted… meaning 10 percent is non-deductible, and leads to an additional ten percent on any gambling losses. Maybe be careful out there if you’re planning on reporting these losses after December 31, 2025!
GRAND TOTAL OF TAX CUTS: $4.5 TRILLION.
DEFENSE FUNDING:
Ah yes, defense funding: the budget TRULY felt the most by the people, in which $350 billion is spread across a number of years for Trump’s border and NatSec plans. This includes $46 billion for his border wall, $45 billion for bed expansion for detention centers, and an entire budget simply to hire 10,000 more ICE agents by 2029.
In fact, the defense funding may be the largest part of this bill, with the money being allocated lasting an astonishing 19 pages in Jed and I’s shared Google Doc (size 11 Arial font, for the font nerds out there). This includes an additional one billion dollars simply for whether the military needs to be deployed to assist at the border, and an additional $8.6 billion in not only military aircraft production, but military aircraft retirement and “procurement.”
WHEN DOES THIS ALL GO INTO EFFECT?:
Immediately
ADDRESSING MISINFORMATION:
You may have noticed that some of the most viral claims about the Big Beautiful Bill weren’t listed above. This isn't because we’re not covering the ENTIRE bill; after all, it’s nearly 900 pages long in its current form and we left out some of the other baffling inclusions, such as a dumping of at least $150 million into expanding AI - and rules now being in place that regulations cannot be placed on AI systems and models involved in interstate commerce for 10 years. No, it’s because there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation being spread about the bill.
As I’m sure you can tell above, the bill is bad enough as it is - we don’t have to work ourselves into a panic being afraid of things not even in the bill. For instance, you may have seen online that ICE’s budget is being increased from $3.5 billion to $48.5 billion. Come on now. That’s not true in the slightest; look, Snopes even has this marked as False!
…because the number is actually closer to $75 billion, not including their annual base budget.
“The most recent version of the legislation as of this writing — passed by the Senate on July 1, 2025 — would allocate at least $29.85 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement until Sept. 30, 2029, with an additional $45 billion appropriated to the agency for detention facilities. In total, that amounts to nearly $75 billion.
ICE's budget as of this writing was about $8 billion a year, according to the agency's own website, not $3.5 billion. The agency plans to spend $10.4 billion in budget year 2025 — which runs from Oct. 1, 2024 to Sept. 30, 2025 — according to a budget overview document. The amount the budget bill would add would be on top of the agency's annual base budget, which Trump proposed $11.2 billion for in budget year 2026. That proposal was not yet in effect and must separately receive Congressional approval.”
This one is a rare case of the misinformation being a DOWNPLAYING of the issue, but thankfully, some of the more salacious claims people are making simply are not true. Like the claim that the bill allows Trump to delay or cancel elections.
The Associated Press writes:
“There is nothing in the legislation that would allow Trump, or any future president, to stop an election from going forward. According to legal experts, a constitutional amendment would have to pass for anyone to have the ability to cancel a federal election. The timing of elections for federal offices is stipulated in federal law and it is highly unlikely that Congress would pass a bill allowing the president to change that timing, experts said.
“Although President Trump might like to cancel or postpone an upcoming election if he thought his party was going to fare poorly, the One Big Beautiful Bill does not actually grant him that power,” said Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center and a political science professor.
…
Burden and other experts agree that these allegations may stem from a misunderstanding of a section of the bill on judicial enforcement that was included in the version passed by the House. That section was removed from the bill after Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that it violates the so-called Byrd Rule, which essentially bars policy matters in budget reconciliation bills.
Section 70302 could have made it easier for Trump to disregard federal court rulings, requiring parties seeking preliminary injunctions or temporary restraining orders to put down a “security,” such as a cash bond, before the court could issue contempt penalties.
Regardless, such a provision would not allow Trump to delay or cancel elections, even if he tried.”
You may have also noticed that by this portion being stricken from the bill, it also does not grant Trump the power to disregard federal court rulings - something that indeed was true to a degree in the House version of the bill, but no longer remains. Nice try, but all in all, this rumor is simply not true.
And thankfully, the Senate parliamentarian decided that we simply cannot cut federal funds to states using Medicaid to provide healthcare for undocumented immigrants or gender transition services, as they were not in compliance with Senate reconciliation rules. If you see anybody claiming these passed… they did not.
Here’s the facts, folks. This bill is a travesty, but its constant revision process has made it a predictable one, as well as a much more manageable one. Many of the cuts and provisions within are scary, but they do not go into effect (in some cases) for quite some time. Unless the changes are marked as immediate, we have time to plan for this - and we have time to stay mad. Many of these changes are strategically going into effect, or ending, around the midterms.
We must never forget what the House, the Senate, and the Trumpworld sycophants have passed into law - and we must not forget that we are better together throughout all of this. Do not despair; the fight has only just begun.
My understanding of the "soft repeal" of the Affordable Care Act does go into effect in the next enrollment window and will be in effect on policies starting on January 1. This hasn't gotten much attention, but premiums are predicted to go up 75-93%. Can you talk more about that?
Appreciative of this bill breakdown! For work, I was so entrenched in the nutrition (SNAP) pieces of this that, aside from a few Medicaid pieces, I glossed over the rest. Thank you for unpacking other important pieces in what I am calling "the Big, Beautiful BOIL."