House Republican Agendas and Project 2025 Would Increase Poverty and Hardship, Drive Up the Uninsured Rate, and Disinvest From People, Communities, and the Economy

Executive Summary

Over the last several months, groups of House Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have released policy agendas that, taken together, would create a harsher country with higher poverty and less opportunity, where millions of people would face higher costs for health care, child care, and housing, and millions more would lose health coverage — all while wealthy households and corporations benefit from an unfair tax code that provides them with outsized tax breaks. These skewed priorities would exacerbate inequities in income, wealth, health, and hardship across lines of race and ethnicity, widening already glaring differences that have their roots in racism and other forms of discrimination.“Behind these eye-popping budget numbers are millions of real people who will see health coverage, food assistance, and other forms of support taken away.”

Looking at three proposals — the House Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) budget plan, the Republican House Budget Committee’s (HBC) budget resolution, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda — brings the implications of influential conservative policymakers’ and a think tank’s broader fiscal policy agenda into sharper focus. That agenda features:

• Policies that raise costs and take away health coverage, food assistance, and other help affording the basics from people when they need them. These policies will create significant economic and health insecurity for millions of people while increasing poverty, hardship, and the number of people lacking health coverage. They will shortchange children’s futures, make it harder for millions of seniors to afford prescription drugs, and take away help that households need to afford food, housing, and child care.For example, the RSC budget calls for $4.5 trillion in cuts over ten years in Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace coverage,^[2] cutting these health coverage funds by more than half. The HBC budget plan, meanwhile, calls for $2.2 trillion in cuts to health coverage — all from Medicaid, the associated committee report suggests.^[3] This cut would amount to 30 percent on average over ten years, and 40 percent in 2034. Nearly 74 million people receive health coverage through Medicaid, so cuts of this magnitude would result in millions losing access to comprehensive coverage.Similarly, the RSC budget calls for cutting average Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by about 22 percent by rescinding the updated 2021 Thrifty Food Plan, which adjusted SNAP benefits to reflect the cost of a healthy diet based on today’s dietary guidelines and food consumption patterns.^[4] This cut would affect 41 million people participating in SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. (HBC and Project 2025 also sharply criticize the Thrifty Food Plan increase but are not clear about rescinding it.^[5]) And Project 2025 calls for gutting summer food assistance programs that children in families with low incomes rely on when school is out, which could include the new Summer EBT program that is expected to provide grocery benefits to more than 21 million children this summer.^[6]The HBC budget plan cuts the “income security” category of programs by almost $1 trillion over ten years; the accompanying report targets SNAP, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (or TANF, which provides flexible funding that states use for a range of benefits and services to low-income families with children). If income security cuts are largely limited to these programs, benefits would be slashed by more than half by 2034.^[7]The RSC budget has very deep cuts in this part of the budget as well. It includes a cut that would convert Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a 50-year-old program that provided income assistance to 7.5 million low-income seniors and disabled people in 2022, to a block grant and end guaranteed cash aid through the program.Many of the proposals in these agendas would shift large costs onto states, forcing them to either kick in far more money — a particular hardship for states with lower per capita incomes — or cut benefits and services to their residents.
• Massive disinvestment in public services, which will limit opportunity, hurt communities, undermine efforts to address climate change, erode basic government functions, and damage the economy. For example, both the HBC and RSC budget plans call for enormous cuts in the part of the budget that funds a wide range of federal services, activities, and assistance­­ — from education investments that build the skills of our future workforce, to transportation infrastructure that supports commerce and safety, to the nation’s weather forecasting system and scientific and medical research. In addition, all three plans would repeal or let expire climate provisions of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. And all three plans call for repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s groundbreaking investments in clean energy.^[8]
• A doubling down on skewed, expensive, and ineffective tax cuts. The RSC and HBC budget plans call for extending all of the 2017 law’s expiring individual income tax cuts,^[9] which would cost nearly $4 trillion over ten years (2026-2035),^[10] and making additional business tax breaks permanent, which would cost nearly a trillion more.^[11] Project 2025 goes even further, calling for a host of new tax cuts for wealthy households and corporations, including for multinational corporations that use overseas tax havens. The HBC budget plan shows none of the costs of extending the expiring 2017 tax cuts in its budget figures, but creates a new procedure allowing unlimited tax cuts.^[12]
• Harsh treatment of immigrants, hurting families, shortchanging children’s futures, undermining immigrants’ contributions to communities and the economy, and hurting the country as a whole. Project 2025, the RSC budget plan, and the HBC budget plan call for a host of harmful policies that would take help away from families that include immigrants when they fall on hard times. Among other proposals, these plans seek to frighten immigrants and their families from participating in the Census, paying their taxes, and receiving benefits for which they are eligible.^[13]

Behind these eye-popping budget numbers are millions of real people who will see health coverage, food assistance, and other forms of support taken away. (See Figure 1.) This will make it even harder for them to afford the basics, leading to serious hardships such as homelessness or overcrowded living, food insecurity, hunger, and untreated health conditions.

It is also notable what is missing from these agendas. Despite rhetoric from some Republicans about the need to support families — and children in particular — these sweeping agendas do not call for new or increased investments to help families afford child care or rent, to expand the Child Tax Credit, or to bolster the EITC for workers without children. And they do nothing to ensure that all workers have access to paid family and medical leave so they can take time off to welcome a new child, attend to a health issue, or care for a family member who needs them.

These agendas, particularly Project 2025, cover multiple areas and this report does not analyze them in full. It provides key examples of fiscal, economic, and health policies within the agendas and, critically, how the plans have broad similarities. Key areas, such as the agendas’ impact on the functioning of the Justice Department, on abortion rights and reproductive freedom, on civil rights protections, and on the potential politicization of federal agencies and the civil service, are critically important but outside the scope of this analysis.

Raising Health Care Costs and Taking Coverage and Other Help Away From People Who Need It

The three policy agendas all share a common thread — taking away help that families use to afford the basics such as food, child care, housing, and health care. The cuts would hit families with low and moderate incomes especially hard while leaving many high-income people largely unscathed. But because investing in areas such as health care and child care has long-term payoffs for the country and economy as a whole, ultimately everyone would lose.

Medicaid Cuts Would Take Away Health Coverage From Millions of People

As noted, HBC would cut Medicaid by $2.2 trillion over ten years;^[14] RSC would cut Medicaid, CHIP, and ACA marketplace assistance by $4.5 trillion, likely by cutting Medicaid even more deeply than the HBC proposals and by making cuts to marketplace policies described below.^[15] The size of the cuts in Project 2025 is less clear but also extremely large. (See Figure 2.)

The ACA’s changes to Medicaid and individual market coverage drove a precipitous decline in the uninsured rate. That is particularly true for people of color, who have historically experienced higher uninsured rates due to systemic racism, discrimination in employment and education, and other factors that diminish income and access to employer-based health insurance. Between 2013 and 2022, uninsured rates for people under age 65 dropped from 23.8 percent to 14.1 percent among American Indian and Alaska Native people, from 29.7 percent to 17.8 percent among Latino people, and from 18.7 percent to 9.9 percent among Black people.^[16] Rolling back or eliminating key ACA improvements — including the Medicaid expansion — and gutting other key Medicaid and marketplace protections would disproportionately harm people of color.

Medicaid proposals in the three agendas include:

• Capping or block-granting Medicaid and providing less funding than is needed to maintain the current program, thereby cutting the number of people who can receive coverage, the services provided, or both (HBC, RSC, and Project 2025);^[17]
• Sharply cutting the share of Medicaid costs the federal government covers while giving states new authority to cut both the number of people and the health benefits Medicaid covers (HBC, RSC, and Project 2025);^[18]
• Taking away financing options states now use to pay their share of Medicaid costs, making enrollment and services cuts even more likely (RSC and Project 2025);^[19]
• Increasing the costs states must bear if they continue or adopt the Medicaid expansion, or explicitly allowing states to shift funds from adult health care coverage to other populations such as children or people with disabilities, with the goal of reducing coverage for adults and potentially pushing some states that have adopted the Medicaid expansion to end it (HBC; Project 2025; and RSC, which has more of these details spelled out);^[20]
• Taking Medicaid coverage away from people who don’t meet rigid work requirements, which evidence from states^[21] has shown doesn’t increase employment and takes coverage away from large numbers of enrollees — including many who are working or who should be exempt given their health conditions (HBC, RSC, and Project 2025);^[22] and
• Allowing states to raise Medicaid premiums (Project 2025)^[23] and make its benefit package far less comprehensive (RSC and Project 2025).^[24]

Gutting ACA Would Raise Health Insurance Costs Sharply and Leave Millions Uninsured

Both Project 2025 and the RSC budget would raise health insurance premiums for millions of people and weaken or eliminate the ACA’s most popular consumer and financial protections. Insurers in the individual market could charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing conditions and remove limits that protect people from very high out-of-pocket health care spending. The HBC and RSC proposals would also cut financial assistance for ACA marketplace coverage,^[25] where more than 20 million people get their health coverage and more than 9 in 10 receive premium tax credits that reduce the cost of their premiums.^[26] The agendas would also strip away anti-discrimination protections that apply to all health programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. While it is not presented as repealing the ACA, dismantling the ACA piecemeal like this would have a similar impact, with millions losing coverage.

Project 2025 and the RSC budget would:

• Cut federal premium tax credits, raising people’s costs. The RSC plan would reduce and ultimately eliminate the financial assistance that most people in ACA marketplace plans receive to help them afford their premiums, deductibles, and other costs under comprehensive health insurance plans, shifting some funding into a block grant.^[27] Project 2025 criticizes federal marketplace financial assistance^[28] and references a separate Heritage Foundation paper that calls for establishing capped federal allotments for states in place of the current ACA subsidies.^[29] The ACA financial assistance — especially with the improvements enacted in 2021 — has helped drive a marked increase in insurance coverage rates, particularly among Black people, Hispanic people, and people with low incomes.^[30]
• Allowing existing improvements to premium tax credits to expire after 2025 — as the HBC budget plan and RSC proposal would do^[31] — would mean premium spikes for nearly all marketplace enrollees. For example, a typical 60-year-old couple making $80,000 (405 percent of the poverty level) would see their marketplace premiums more than triple to over $24,000 per year. (See Figure 3 for estimates by state.)^[32] In addition, an estimated 4 million people would become uninsured, with the greatest coverage losses occurring among Black and Hispanic people in states that have not expanded Medicaid.^[33] Eliminating the PTCs entirely,^[34] meanwhile, would lead to even greater coverage losses, increase people’s premium costs even further, and throw stable insurance markets into disarray. For example, without a PTC, a 40-year-old person making $29,000 (roughly 200 percent of the poverty level) would see their annual marketplace premiums increase from $570 to $5,700.^[35]

• Eviscerate federal protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The RSC and Project 2025 plans would roll back federal insurance protections for people in marketplace plans in favor of separating healthy people and those with pre-existing conditions into different markets that operate under different rules.The RSC proposal would allow insurers to charge higher premiums for individual market coverage (both inside and outside the ACA marketplace) to people with pre-existing conditions and exclude certain benefits from plans they buy.^[36] The proposal says people with chronic and complex conditions would get coverage through separate state-run high-risk pools,^[37]but these existed prior to the ACA and had high premiums, gaps in benefits, and limited enrollment because of their cost.^[38]Project 2025 proposes “regulatory relief” that amounts to eliminating many critical federal health reforms; it doesn’t specify which ones but calls for the federal government to create a second insurance market not subject to ACA standards,^[39] which would attract healthier enrollees, with the likely result that premiums for those with pre-existing conditions would become unaffordable. This would disproportionately harm Black people: due to racial inequities in social and economic factors — such as being likelier to live in communities with less access to health care or to have lower incomes that make it harder to afford healthy food — they have a higher prevalence of several common chronic conditions.^[40]Both the RSC plan and Project 2025 would increase the availability of health plans that are currently exempt from ACA standards and protections, such as short-term health plans.^[41] This is another strategy to lead people with fewer health care needs away from the ACA marketplace’s comprehensive health plans, resulting in a sicker risk pool and higher premiums for those enrolled in marketplace plans.^[42]
• Roll back federal protections that explicitly prohibit insurers and health care providers from discriminating against LGBTQ+ people and people who have had abortions or miscarriages. Section 1557 of the ACA prohibits Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) programs, as well as insurance companies and health care providers that receive HHS funding, from discriminating against members of certain protected groups. Project 2025 seeks to end protections that currently apply to LGBTQ+ individuals, pregnant people, and people who have had an abortion or miscarriage.^[43]

Taking Food, Other Assistance Away From Low-Income Households Would Increase Poverty, Hunger

Both the RSC and HBC plans call for large cuts to the part of the budget that funds income and food assistance programs such as SNAP. The HBC plan, for example, calls for $962 billion in cuts over ten years to “income security” programs, and its accompanying report indicates that SNAP, TANF, and the tax refunds provided through the EITC and Child Tax Credit would be targeted for cuts.^[44] If income security cuts are largely limited to these programs, benefits would be slashed by more than half by 2034.^[45]

All three agendas — HBC, RSC, and Project 2025 — call explicitly for significant cuts to SNAP. This is the nation’s largest and most important anti-hunger program, providing families with funds on an electronic benefit card that they use to purchase food at the grocery store. Taken together, these cuts would reduce or take away entirely food assistance for millions of people.

More than 44 million people in the United States live in households that experience food insecurity. Due to past and ongoing racism and discrimination, households that are American Indian or Alaska Native, Black, Hispanic, or multiracial experience much higher than average levels of food insecurity.^[46] SNAP is highly effective at reducing food insecurity, and there is emerging evidence that SNAP may mitigate racial inequities in food insecurity and poverty.^[47] But the proposed cuts to SNAP could weaken its effectiveness and exacerbate these inequities.

The proposed cuts include the following:

• The RSC budget calls for SNAP benefits to be cut by an average of 22 percent by undoing the recent, congressionally mandated re-evaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan — a long-overdue step that resulted in an upward revision to SNAP benefits to more accurately reflect both the cost of a modest but healthy diet and U.S. food consumption patterns.^[48] This update to the Thrifty Food Plan lifts over 2 million SNAP participants above the poverty line, with the greatest poverty-reducing impact for Black and Hispanic individuals.^[49] Undoing the revision would reverse this progress and cut benefits to some 41 million SNAP enrollees, including nearly 17 million children, slashing the average SNAP benefit from about $6.20 per person per day to only $4.80 in 2025. (See Figure 4.) Both Project 2025 and the HBC budget resolution also sharply criticize the 2021 re-evaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan.^[50]
• Meeting one’s life-sustaining needs should not be contingent on meeting a work requirement. But both the RSC budget and Project 2025 call for expanding the number of SNAP enrollees whose benefits would be taken away if they aren’t able to meet rigid work requirements — a policy already in place for most adults aged 18 through 54 who don’t receive disability benefits and don’t live with children.^[51]Most SNAP participants who can work, do.^[52] These requirements are premised on the false assumption that people who receive SNAP do not work and must be compelled to do so — an assumption rooted in a host of unfounded prejudices based on race, gender, disability status, and class. Rigorous studies have shown that the current work requirement policy is ineffective at increasing employment. Instead, it takes food assistance away from people with very low incomes and increases food insecurity and hardship.^[53]Policies that take food assistance away from people who don’t meet a rigid work requirement ignore the realities of the low-paid labor market, such as irregular hours and a lack of paid sick days that lead to frequent job loss; the impact of work-limiting health conditions and caregiving responsibilities on a participant’s ability to find and keep consistent work; and substantial ongoing labor market discrimination.The report accompanying the HBC budget resolution also calls for expanding ineffective work requirements.^[54]
• Both the RSC budget and Project 2025 propose eliminating a long-standing SNAP option — a popular one, used in more than 40 states led by governors of both parties — that modestly raises SNAP’s income eligibility limits for certain households, including many households with earnings.^[55] This policy, known as broad-based categorical eligibility, extends SNAP eligibility to many working families with low incomes for whom affording food is difficult because they face high costs for necessities like housing or child care. This option also allows states to adopt a less restrictive asset test to qualify for SNAP, allowing low-income households to build modest savings without losing food assistance. Eliminating this option would terminate SNAP for millions of people with low incomes and would take food assistance away primarily from working families, older adults, and people with disabilities. Punishing asset building would particularly harm people of color who participate in SNAP, who face structural disadvantages to building wealth and getting ahead.

The attacks on food and other assistance to low-income families aren’t limited to SNAP. For example:

• Project 2025 would also end most summer food assistance programs, designed to mitigate food insecurity when school is out and children don’t get school meals.^[56] Many children who receive free or reduced-price school meals struggle to access nutritious food when school lets out for the summer. Studies have shown that households with school-aged children experience higher rates of food hardship during the summer.^[57] Project 2025 could take away food assistance from roughly 21 million children in low-income families who are expected to receive grocery benefits this year through the new Summer EBT program, which was established by Congress in 2022 on a bipartisan basis to address this seasonal spike in child hunger. Project 2025 would also gut the Summer Food Service Program, which provides meals to more than 2 million children on average each day when school is out.
• Project 2025 and the RSC budget would make it harder and more stigmatizing for children in low-income communities to get free school meals. Currently, schools in every state serving large numbers of children in low-income families can provide free school meals to all children in the school, reducing administrative costs and eliminating the stigma associated with targeted participation. Almost 20 million children nationwide attend a school that uses this option.^[58] Both Project 2025 and RSC would end this policy.^[59]
• Project 2025 calls for ending Head Start, which provides early learning and other services to about 800,000 preschoolers, toddlers, and infants.^[60] More than a third (37 percent) of the children enrolled in Head Start are Latine, nearly 30 percent (28 percent) are Black, about one-quarter are white, 3 percent are American Indian and Alaskan Native, and 3 percent are Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.^[61]
• The RSC budget calls for effectively ending guaranteed income assistance through SSI, which provided cash assistance to 7.5 million very low-income seniors and people with disabilities in 2022 (the last year data are available).^[62] The plan calls for converting the funding (at what level is unclear) to a block grant to states, jeopardizing basic assistance for people whom the federal government for 50 years has recognized need income assistance they can count on.^[63] (See Figure 5.)

• Project 2025 calls for taking away housing assistance from people who can’t meet a work requirement or who reach an arbitrary time limit on how long they can receive assistance, even if they still need help to afford rent and avoid eviction. It would also end effective strategies for addressing homelessness that pair rental assistance with personalized supportive services, in favor of policies that research has found are less effective.^[64] Like in other areas, these policies would disproportionately harm people of color, and especially Black people, who are far more likely than white people to experience homelessness and eviction. Discrimination was and is prevalent in housing as in other sectors, with one of the most consequential examples being federal “redlining” policies that made it far more difficult for Black people to become homeowners.Project 2025 and the RSC budget would eliminate or weaken fair housing tools and enforcement, allowing for greater discrimination in housing that would exacerbate existing inequities.^[65]

Enormous Costs Shifted to States, Widening Gaps Between Wealthier and Poorer States

All three agendas would cut funding that goes to states and localities, both in “mandatory” programs such as Medicaid and SNAP and in “discretionary” programs funded through the annual appropriations process, from transportation to public health to child care (see next section). As discussed above, the HBC, Project 2025, and RSC plans include proposals explicitly designed to shift costs from the federal government to states, including block-granting Medicaid or cutting the share of the program funded by the federal government.^[66] The RSC budget also proposes block-granting SNAP and combining child nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Child and Adult Care Food Program, Summer Food Service Program, and Special Milk Program, into a single block grant, likely with reduced funding.^[67]

Under the RSC proposal, which would replace the long-standing Medicaid matching rate formula with a 50 percent rate for all states, the sharpest increases in Medicaid costs would generally occur in states whose residents have lower incomes and experience higher poverty rates — the states that can least afford the cost shift.^[68] These states would experience the biggest cuts under the RSC proposal because, under current law, the federal government pays a larger share of Medicaid costs in states that have lower per capita incomes, recognizing the challenges these states face in financing health care costs. These are the same states that will struggle to make up for cuts in other areas, such as education or child care (discussed below), making it particularly hard for them to backfill for federal Medicaid funds, likely widening gaps between wealthier and poorer states in areas such as quality of education or health care access and coverage.

Finally, as noted, the RSC calls for converting the SSI program from one that now provides seniors and people with disabilities with federally funded cash assistance they can count on every month, to instead be a block grant to states, presumably with reduced funding. If funding proved inadequate, low-income seniors or people with disabilities would either receive less help or states would have to pick up the tab.

Massive Disinvestment in People, Communities, and the Building Blocks of Our Economy

The federal budget funds a host of investments in people, communities, and the economy as well as core functions of government through programs and initiatives funded through the appropriations process. This part of the budget (whose amounts are set annually) funds efforts such as: medical and basic scientific research; the weather forecasting system; education from preschool through college; housing; child care; tax system customer service and enforcement of our tax laws; disease monitoring and response to public health crises; the processing of applications and benefits in Social Security; anti-fraud staff in Medicare; investments in roads, bridges, public transit, and ports; and environmental clean-up and enforcement.

This part of the budget is called “discretionary” to connote that the spending is not fixed in law and that Congress has the discretion to set funding levels each year. But these kinds of investments are not optional for the safety, well-being, and thriving of our country and its economy, now and into the future.

Moreover, many of these investments — some targeted and others more broad based — promote opportunity for people and communities that have been under-resourced for decades due to federal, state, and local policy, especially Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, and people with low incomes living in rural and urban communities alike. These include additional funding for schools that serve large numbers of children in low-income families, college financial aid that paves the way to higher education, and funds for child care and preschool and for affordable housing development and rental assistance.^[69]

Despite these critical functions, both the RSC budget and the HBC budget resolution call for massive disinvestment in this part of the budget — non-defense discretionary spending.^[70] Indeed, the HBC budget would cut this part of the budget by $3.1 trillion over the decade. The RSC budget would cut even more, $4.1 trillion over the decade,^[71] by making the cuts occur immediately rather than phasing them in.

Under both plans, non-defense discretionary spending would fall from its current level of 3.3 percent of GDP to about 1.4 or 1.5 percent after a decade — levels not seen since the Coolidge Administration a century ago. The programs targeted for these cuts are almost entirely unspecified, but if veterans’ health care is shielded, then under either of these plans, by 2034 spending for the remaining programs would fall by half.

Even though the plans do not offer many specifics, the cuts are so large that there is simply no way that all critically important public services could be protected. The result would likely be damaging cuts in our education and child care investments that build the human capital of our future workforce and allow parents to work, our transportation infrastructure that is critical to moving goods and services and keeping people safe, and our weather forecasting system that is essential for basic safety and commerce. And it would mean cutting staffing for agencies that help people access Social Security, ensure that Medicare providers are providing good care and playing by the rules, and enforce environmental laws and mitigate hazardous conditions. All of these public services are critical to people, families, communities, and the basic functioning of society.

The cuts the three agendas do specify include, for example, Project 2025’s elimination of Head Start (discussed above), which is funded in this part of the budget. Other examples include the following:

• Project 2025 calls for the Department of Education to be eliminated over time, with some programs transferred elsewhere and the rest abolished.^[72] It would phase out over ten years the largest federal K-12 program, “Title I Education for the Disadvantaged,” which provides critical funding for school districts in communities experiencing high levels of poverty. Given the disproportionate child poverty rates among Black, Latine, and Indigenous children, this cut would exacerbate educational inequities. The RSC budget would eliminate a number of grants to school systems, and while it wouldn’t do so for Title I outright, that program would be at risk under RSC’s proposal that allows states to opt to receive all of their federal education funds through a block grant.^[73] Both Project 2025 and RSC would make it harder for students to afford college by cutting financial aid.
• The RSC budget would take away assistance that millions of low-income households use to pay for heating, and in some states cooling, their homes, by eliminating the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).^[74]
• The RSC and HBC budgets would eliminate federal funds for the Legal Services Corporation, which provides financial support for roughly 130 nonprofit legal aid agencies nationwide.^[75] Those agencies provide legal assistance to low-income families in handling non-criminal legal matters such as housing, child custody, domestic abuse, divorce, access to health care, employment law, and debt collection.
• The RSC budget calls for “significantly” reducing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget, which the agency uses to reduce pollution, clean up hazardous waste, develop and enforce environmental standards, and help finance facilities for wastewater and drinking water treatment.^[76] Among other things, the RSC budget calls for termination of surface water protection programs, which protect coastal waters and sources of drinking water such as rivers and lakes. The budget claims that states are better equipped to manage those waters, yet many of them flow or lie between states. Project 2025 and the HBC plan also call for cuts in EPA funding.^[77]
• The RSC budget calls for elimination of all Energy Department funding for researching, developing, demonstrating, and deploying technologies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting energy efficiency.^[78] It would repeal clean energy provisions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, including those supporting electric vehicles and low-emission school buses.^[79] Project 2025 also calls for rescinding all remaining renewable energy funding appropriated in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.^[80] The HBC plan criticized the infrastructure law and would not extend it, hampering efforts to combat climate change.^[81] And, relatedly, all three plans call for repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s investments in clean energy.^[82]
• The RSC budget would eliminate both capital and operating funding for Amtrak, along with any further funding for high-speed rail. It would also end capital investment grants for mass transit and “RAISE” competitive grants for surface transportation infrastructure projects.^[83]
• The RSC budget would both reduce the annual funding level for the IRS and repeal all that remains of funding provided in the Inflation Reduction Act to rebuild the IRS’ capacity to provide good customer service and enforce the tax laws and collect revenue that is due (discussed more below).^[84]
• The RSC budget would eliminate funding for programs that are critical for states and localities to build and rehabilitate affordable housing and cut funding in half for fair housing education and enforcement.^[85]

This is a recipe not for a thriving nation but for one retreating from its basic obligations to keep people safe and healthy and our economy strong. The impacts will at first fall most heavily on low- and middle-income people, who are least able to rely on private resources to replace basic government functions. Ultimately, though, these investments are critical for our economy and nation as a whole.

Doubling Down on Skewed, Expensive, and Failed Tax Policies

At the same time that these policy agendas call for massive disinvestment in public services and taking health coverage, food assistance, and other forms of assistance away from people who face challenges affording the basics, all three plans double down on expensive tax cuts mostly benefiting wealthy people and corporations. Project 2025 even calls for tax increases on low- and middle-income people.

Due to racial barriers to economic opportunity, households of color are overrepresented among households with incomes in the low end of the distribution, while non-Hispanic white households are heavily overrepresented among households with incomes at the top of the distribution.^[86] Each of the three proposals would disproportionately benefit high-income households and exacerbate racial inequities.

For example, each agenda would double down on the 2017 tax cuts, whose core provisions are tilted heavily toward high-income households.^[87] (See Figure 6.)

• The report accompanying the HBC budget resolution calls for extending all of the expiring 2017 tax cuts (at a cost of $4 trillion from 2026-2035) and making permanent costly business tax cuts.^[88] But HBC does not include these costs in its budget resolution numbers, instead relying on language in the resolution allowing for consideration of these and other tax cuts regardless of cost.^[89]
• The RSC budget calls for the continuation of all of the 2017 law’s individual income tax cuts and adds substantial tax cuts for corporations, wealthy shareholders, and large estates on top.^[90] These include: repealing the estate tax, which less than 0.2 percent of estates now pay; lowering already low taxes on capital gains by indexing capital gains before calculating taxes; ^[91] repealing the Inflation Reduction Act provision that better ensures that large, highly profitable corporations pay at least some taxes; providing new tax breaks to already low-taxed corporations based on the amount they spend on certain investments; and expanding tax breaks for pass-through businesses, which saw large tax windfalls in the 2017 tax law from a special deduction that exempts from tax up to 20 percent of pass-through business income.^[92]

• Project 2025 goes further, calling for a set of extreme near-term tax policies that would raise taxes on middle- and low-income households while cutting them for wealthy households, shareholders, and corporations.^[93] Some examples include:
  • Changes to the tax brackets so that many low- and middle-income households would pay more while high-income households pay substantially less, by raising the lowest tax rate and lowering the highest tax rate.^[94] Wealthy households would further benefit from cutting capital gains tax rates from 20 percent to 15 percent and eliminating a 3.8 percent surtax (known as the net investment income tax) on capital gains and other forms of unearned income. (See Figure 7.)
  • Reducing the already too-low corporate tax rate even further, all the way to 18 percent. The 2017 tax law already gave corporations huge tax cuts by lowering the rate to 21 percent. This would provide a further tax cut of roughly $400 billion over ten years to large corporations on top of their 2017 windfall.^[95]
  • Giving new tax breaks to corporations that shift profits overseas.
  • Cutting the estate tax, which only applies to the largest estates, and cutting the taxes shareholders pay when corporations distribute profits.
• Project 2025 also proposes long-term tax reforms that would dramatically shift the onus of taxation to middle- and low-income households.^[96] Some of these proposals are vague, but they include shifting to a national sales tax (known as a consumption tax), which generally imposes far greater tax liability on middle- and low-income households who, compared to wealthy households, need to spend a larger share of their income on goods and services and who save a smaller share as they make ends meet. Project 2025 also proposes anti-democratic supermajority requirements on Congress to raise revenues, a tactic conservative states use to push taxes lower (there is no supermajority requirement to cut taxes), which would make it hard for the nation to respond to new needs or even raise revenues to lower deficits.

All three agendas call for repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s funding for the IRS.^[97] This funding is helping the IRS dramatically improve its customer service, operate the direct file mechanism so people can file their taxes directly with the IRS for free, and modernize and dramatically improve its tax enforcement efforts, which are already paying off in cracking down on wealthy tax cheats.^[98]

Notably missing from these policy agendas is a positive tax agenda that would reflect some of the populist rhetoric some Republicans are employing about the need to support families and workers. These agendas would roll back rather than continue the expanded premium tax credits that have dramatically reduced the cost of health coverage for millions of people and expanded coverage,^[99] and they don’t include Child Tax Credit and EITC expansions that would help middle- and lower-income families raising children and workers in lower-paid jobs.

Moreover, even as Project 2025 would raise taxes on middle- and low-income households, these families would all see sharp reductions in basic public services they benefit from, from quality schools and universities, to medical breakthroughs, to Medicaid, which serves nearly 74 million people.

Policies That Harm Immigrants and Their Families and Hurt Our Country as a Whole

Immigrants and their families are important parts of our communities. They bring vitality to our neighborhoods, they do important and often difficult work, they are business owners, and they contribute to the fabric of our nation in countless ways. Immigration has boosted our nation’s labor force at a time when the native-born population is aging, providing critical energy to our economy and helping to improve the financing of Social Security and Medicare over the coming decades. A recent Congressional Budget Office report highlights these economic contributions, showing that over a ten-year period (2024-2034), increased immigration would result in a GDP increase of $8.9 trillion and a decrease in the federal deficit by $900 billion.^[100] CBO projects that in 2034, GDP will be an estimated 3.2 percent higher than it would be without these immigrants.^[101]

Despite these contributions, the HBC budget plan, the RSC budget, and Project 2025 all treat immigrants — including those with a lawful immigration status — and their families harshly, putting concrete, harmful policies behind the ugly anti-immigrant rhetoric too prevalent in our public discourse.

For example, all three plans would reinstate the Trump Administration’s harsh public charge immigration policy, which essentially sought to create a wealth test for lawful immigration, preventing people from immigrating to the U.S. if they are not already economically successful.^[102] The rule included an income test that could have blocked up to 99.2 percent of the population of South Asia, 98.5 percent of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa, and 79.0 percent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean from immigrating to the U.S.^[103] The rule ignores the record of achievement and upward mobility that immigrants and their descendants have shown for generations in the U.S.

The public charge changes also created fear among immigrants and their families that receiving benefits that Congress has made them eligible for would hurt their ability to remain in the country or have family members come. When proposed during the Trump Administration, the policy was shown to have a chilling effect on families’ willingness to access food assistance and health coverage that they qualified for. That includes forgoing help that their children — often citizens — needed. ^[104]

Even harsher, the RSC budget calls for a radical departure to how we treat immigrants who have lawful status, proposing to deny all public benefits (the precise scope is not clear) to anyone who is not a citizen, including immigrants who have lawful immigration status.^[105] We already bar most lawful permanent residents from accessing public benefits such as Medicaid and SNAP during their first five years with that status in the U.S. People who have no documented status are blocked entirely for almost all benefits (with narrow exceptions such as Medicaid payment to health providers when people need emergency services in life-threatening circumstances).^[106] But this proposal would further restrict benefits for immigrants, leaving many without any supports if they fall on hard times.