President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is indeed Big. But Beautiful it is not. The massive bill he is touting as the best thing to ever happen to America would be, no exaggeration, one of the worst pieces of legislation to come along in the modern era.

Take a seat if you don’t already have one so we can count the ways.

Many prior Republican Congresses have run up debt while sending most benefits to the wealthiest Americans, but none have done so this egregiously. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, over the next eight years, the One Big Beautiful Bill would boost the resources of those in the top tenth of income by 2.3%, while draining the resources of those in the bottom 10% by 3.9%. Quite literally, the richer you are, the more help you get, the poorer, the harder you get hit.

Why? Because the bill eviscerates spending on health care for the poor and makes changes to Obamacare insurance marketplaces that would hurt the lowest-income workers — while simultaneously slashing taxes in a way to help the wealthiest among us the most. Add in tariffs, which hit the poorest people the hardest because they spend the largest share of their incomes on goods, and the economic devastation grows.

There was a time when Republicans claimed to care about debt and deficits. Independent fiscal scorekeepers with sophisticated budget models, from the Congressional Budget Office to the Tax Foundation to the Peter Peterson Foundation to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. project that if it becomes law, this bill will drive debt to previously unimagined levels — between $52 trillion and $56 trillion.

How big is $56 trillion? It’s roughly half the estimated economic activity of all the nations on the planet. The United States already spends $1.1 trillion a year to service its debt; if Trump has his way, those annual interest payments would rise sharply, to $1.8 trillion. And this is a president who huffs and puffs about meaningless trade deficits.

If the OBBB cut taxes while tending to the debt and wisely cut spending across the federal government, it would at least be an internally consistent expression of Republican philosophy, an attempt to radically shrink the footprint of the federal government.

Instead, the same Republican Party that used to want to pare back government spending would shell out $168 billion for immigration and border enforcement. As the Cato Institute points out, “In FY 2025… Congress allocated nearly $34 billion to immigration and border enforcement agencies. That’s 36 times more than what is provided for tax and financial crimes enforcement (IRS-Treasury), 21 times more than funding for firearms enforcement (ATF), 13 times more than drug enforcement (DEA), and eight times more than the FBI budget to enforce effectively everything else.”

Trump and company would take that already high immigration enforcement figure and multiply it by five. Spending far more on immigration enforcement to systematically round up otherwise law-abiding, productive undocumented citizens will hammer the American economy.

The bill will also kill crucial energy tax credits to boost underperforming fossil fuels, spiking electricity prices — while abandoning any federal attempt to address climate change.

The OBBB will explode debt, lavish benefits on the wealthy, hurt the poorest among us, indiscriminately inflate government spending, accelerate climate change and wallop the American economy. It’s positively beastly.

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