Thursday, May 22, 2025

May 22, 2025 (con't)

Alt National Park Service

Sorry for the length, but we’ve updated this post to reflect all the changes that have been made to the bill. Trump’s “One Big 💩 Bill” is Project 2025 in legislative form. Here’s how it quietly turns a far-right wishlist into federal law:
- Sec. 10008 - Expands work requirements for SNAP
- Project 2025: Pushes “moral reform” to make low-income people work more for food assistance.
- Sec. 10011 - Repeals education & obesity prevention grants
- Project 2025: Eliminates “social engineering” and funnels funding into “traditional values” education.
- Sec. 10012 - Restricts immigrant access to SNAP
- Project 2025: Blocks aid to undocumented and many legal immigrants.
- Sec. 110115 - Creates “Trump Accounts” and a Trump savings pilot program
- Project 2025: Promotes private savings plans tied to “American values” and market-based welfare.
- Sec. 44125 - Bans federal Medicaid/CHIP funding for gender transition procedures for minors
- Project 2025: Calls for a nationwide ban on federal support for gender-affirming care.
- Sec. 44141 - Requires states to impose Medicaid work requirements
- Project 2025: Promotes work mandates for benefits under the guise of personal responsibility.
- Sec. 44110 - Cuts off Medicaid/CHIP for those without verified legal status
- Project 2025: Strips access to healthcare for undocumented immigrants and narrows eligibility for others.
- Sec. 20001 - Military expansion for “quality of life” and Indo-Pacific readiness
- Project 2025: Backs massive defense buildup, especially near China and the southern border.
Dozens of sections quietly restructure the federal government to match the far-right’s long-term goals:
Guts environmental protections
- Sec. 42108 - Repeals Clean Air Act provisions used to limit emissions
- Sec. 42117 - Eliminates environmental and climate justice block grants
- Sec. 42301 - Strips EPA authority to enforce vehicle emissions standards
- Sec. 41009 - Rescinds funds from national parks, conservation, and climate programs
- Secs. 80307-80309 - Rescind National Park Service (NPS) funds provided under the Inflation Reduction Act:
- Sec. 80307: Cancels unobligated balances from Section 50221 (BLM and NPS resilience & restoration)
- Sec. 80308: Cancels funds from Section 50222 (ecosystem protection and climate adaptation)
- Sec. 80309: Cancels funds from Section 50223 (historic preservation and legacy infrastructure)
- Project 2025: Seeks to eliminate conservation efforts and open public lands for extraction and development.
- Sec. 80301-80309 - Blocks federal land conservation plans; rescinds NPS/BLM funds
- Sec. 80151-80152 - Charges protest fees and kills environmental data programs
- Project 2025: Calls for dismantling the EPA and environmental oversight to unleash fossil fuel production.
Centralizes power in the executive
- Sec. 30051 - Blocks agencies from issuing new rules without meeting strict cost-benefit standards
- Sec. 30061 - Prohibits the Secretary of Education from proposing new regulations
- Project 2025: Places all federal agencies under direct presidential control.
Weakens federal worker protections
- Sec. 90004 - Allows new federal hires to be fired at will-reviving “Schedule F”
- Sec. 90005 - Increases pension contributions for federal workers
- Sec. 90006 - Eliminates early retirement supplements
- Project 2025: Aims to purge and replace career civil servants with political loyalists.
Limits state authority
- Sec. 44001 - Preempts state and local governments from regulating artificial intelligence for 10 years
- Project 2025: Centralizes federal power to override states on tech, education, and energy policy.
Defunds watchdogs and public interest enforcement
- Sec. 50003 - Guts the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
- Sec. 50002 - Cuts enforcement powers from oversight bodies like the PCAOB
- Project 2025: Labels oversight and regulation as “deep state overreach.”
More buried provisions with Project 2025 fingerprints:
- Sec. 41008 - Creates a “De-Risking Fund” to protect fossil fuel companies from court orders or regulation
- Project 2025: Seeks to shield oil and gas interests from legal and environmental challenges.
- Sec. 44122 - Limits retroactive Medicaid coverage
- Project 2025: Reduces healthcare access by tightening eligibility windows.
- Sec. 44131 - Ends extra funding for states that expand Medicaid
- Project 2025: Actively seeks to roll back Medicaid expansion entirely.
- Sec. 80121(h) - Strips courts of jurisdiction to review federal permits and approvals
- Project 2025: Removes judicial oversight over mining, drilling, leasing, and environmental enforcement, effectively silencing the courts.
This isn’t just another bill. It’s the Project 2025 playbook written into law. This bill abuses budget reconciliation rules to jam through non-budget items: education rollbacks, environmental deregulation, and civil service purges.
Read the fine print. Read the bill.

Alt National Park Service

Inside Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”: Judicial Silencing (Sec. 80121(h)). This might be the most authoritarian section in the entire 1,100+ page bill.
What it says:
“No court shall have jurisdiction to review any action taken by the Secretary, the EPA Administrator, a State or municipal agency, or any other Federal agency […] to issue a lease, permit, biological opinion, or other approval.”
What it means:
- If the government approves drilling, mining, or development, even illegally, you can’t sue.
- It applies retroactively, killing lawsuits already in progress.
- Tribes, environmental groups, citizens, even states, lose the right to challenge these approvals in court.
Why it matters:
This guts judicial review, a cornerstone of U.S. democracy. Courts are the only check on executive overreach. This section erases that check for some of the most destructive decisions the government can make.
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May 22, 2022

If passed, this measure will put Trump’s wish list into law. Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,” as Dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky explained in Just Security Monday. “Without the contempt power,” he writes, “judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.”
Three judges are currently considering whether the administration is in contempt of court over its apparent disregard for court orders over its rendition of undocumented immigrants to third countries.
But the center of the bill is indeed related to money: it is the $3.8 trillion extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations. Yesterday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that Americans in the lowest tenth of earners will lose money under the measure while people in the top five percent of earners will see a tax cut of $117.2 billion, more than 20% of the tax cuts in the bill.
Poorer Americans take a hit from the bill because it cuts federal healthcare and food assistance programs to partially offset the costs of the tax cuts. Cuts to Medicaid are expected to leave at least 9 million people without healthcare coverage. Cuts of about 30% to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be “the biggest cut in the program’s history,” Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Lorie Konish of CNBC. They would cut about $300 billion from the program through 2034. More than 40 million people, including children, seniors, and adults with disabilities, receive food assistance.
Yesterday the CBO reported that the measure will add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and noted that when a budget adds too much to the federal deficit, it triggers cuts to Medicare (not a typo) under the Pay-As-You-Go law. The CBO explains that those cuts are limited by law to 4% but would still total about $490 billion from 2027 through 2034. Heather Cox Richardson

Rep. Melanie Stansbury 

🚨 Breaking 🚨
Republicans rejected every single one of the more than 500 Democratic amendments we offered on Reconciliation— but then dropped a huge “manager’s amendment” at the last moment they’ve been negotiating all day behind closed doors. Here’s what’s in their big compromise (it’s a real doozy):
-Ups the start date for Medicaid repeals to start December 2026 (increasing suffering by two years)
-Increases healthcare premiums
(for hundreds of thousands of MORE people likely to lose healthcare)
-Zeros out taxes for the transfer of silencers on guns (why!?!?)
-Extends a permitting pay-to-play scheme to natural gas pipelines (another oil and gas giveaway)
-Repeals clean energy incentives and expedites nuclear energy
-And renames accounts for newborns to “Trump” accounts (because there’s nothing weird about that)…
All re
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