Trump’s army makes America poor again

Paranoia has long been the bedrock of the MAGA movement. For years, it has maintained that the establishment was abusing its power to steal elections, that the federal government or “deep state” might seize power at any moment, and that it was the duty of patriots to resist all such efforts.

And yet, Donald Trump will spend this Fourth of July signing into law an act that turns Immigration and Customs Enforcement – better known as ICE – into a force larger than most of the world’s armies, and his supporters will cheer it on.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s insistence on a ridiculous name combined with various House and Senate rules, the bill is known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It includes more than $170bn over the next four years for ICE, for Trump’s border wall, and for immigration detention.

The scale of this increase in funding is hard to comprehend. ICE’s detention facilities now have more funding than the entire US prison system. ICE will be better funded than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. Its funding has tripled overnight – meaning the agency will expand far more quickly than is usual, with every new officer being aware that their career and funding is due entirely to Trump and the Republicans.

Just based on its current allocation for 2025, analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute shows that ICE has 36 times more funding than the Inland Revenue Service has to fight tax fraud and financial crimes. It has 21 times the funding available to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to enforce the laws on firearms and arms smuggling. It has 13 times the funding available to the Drug Enforcement Administration, at a time when Trump has claimed the fentanyl crisis is one of his top priorities. ICE has eight times the total budget available to the FBI. This bill further expands ICE drastically while doing nothing for any of these other causes.

This unprecedented increase in spending will doubtless lead to massive waste and corruption. Even the best managed organisation in the world would make major errors trying to scale up so fast, and Trump’s administration is hardly known for its good governance.

But fraud and waste will likely be the least of anyone’s concerns. Under Trump, ICE now routinely sends masked agents with no identification to snatch people off the street, before deporting them without process, sometimes to be tortured in overseas prisons. It has been given both the funding and the mandate to expand that horror on an unimaginable scale, just as the Supreme Court has shredded the ability of the legal system to do anything to stop it. There are dark days ahead for America.

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That massive expansion of funding for ICE, given it has already been operating as something close to an extrajudicial militia for Donald Trump and his immigration supremo Stephen Miller, is the most obviously alarming measure of Trump’s radical spending bill – but it is hardly the only element of the legislation likely to do harm.

Around 16 million people will lose access to Medicaid, the USA’s basic health insurance for those on low incomes, as a result of around $1 trillion ($1,000bn) in cuts. The direct effects of nearly one in twenty Americans losing access to healthcare are bad enough, but Medicaid funds things like drug and alcohol rehab, the loss of which have knock-on effects for crime and communities.

In this case, though, the consequences for many Trump-voting areas will be even more serious. Many rural hospitals in America rely on Medicaid to stay afloat, because the communities they serve are so poor. With eligibility for Medicaid so severely restricted, many of these hospitals will simply no longer be viable, and will close down – leaving even those who still have insurance with no healthcare anywhere near their home.

There was no shortage of warnings that this would be a consequence of this legislation, and that it would hit Trump voters hardest. Trump and his Republicans were more than happy to vote for it anyway, not least because it came alongside massive, permanent tax cuts for America’s ultra-rich. The bill is almost cartoonish in its design: it quite literally takes from the poorest to give to the ultra-rich.

Republicans in Congress have spent years saying that America’s spending and government debt was out of control – naturally blaming the Democrats for this, even though Republicans have done at least as much to add debt to the pile – and have promised to take action on that front.

In a sense, the Republicans have certainly done that. The bill has been independently “scored” as adding at least $3 trillion to America’s national debt. Trump’s White House is trying to pretend this analysis is somehow biased or wrong, but its own actions show it knows this isn’t true – alongside everything else, Congress also voted to increase the debt ceiling (which caps the amount the US can borrow) by $5 trillion.

Republican lawmakers have made refusing to increase the debt ceiling the centrepiece of their political careers. They have vowed never to vote for legislation that increased borrowing. They have made noise on this issue on every TV programme they could for years. And they folded, immediately, without a single concession for the simple reason that Donald Trump wanted to be able to sign this bill on the Fourth of July, and they dared not be the ones to deny him.The Fourth of July is the day the USA celebrates its hard-won independence from an autocratic king. This year, it will mark that day for the 249^th time with a bill that essentially creates one anew – and gives him his own private army, too. Happy “independence” day, America.