President Donald Trump marked the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding on July Fourth with a speech touting a roaring stock market, urging election reforms, and hailing military interventions in Venezuela and Iran.
But another anniversary went conspicuously unmarked: the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by Trump exactly one year earlier.
At its ceremonious signing, the act seemed poised to be a defining legislative achievement for Republicans to run on in November.
But 12 months later, the law’s cutbacks to key safety-net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps have fueled a chorus of criticism, challenging the effort to promote its populist and business-friendly tax cuts.
While the president and his party have sought to play up the law’s most popular provisions, even attempting to recast it as a “Working Families Tax Cut Bill,” Democrats have seized on negative polling and the Republican rebrand as evidence of its failures.
