One year of the “Big, Beautiful” Bill — and the storm it ushered in
Twelve months after President Trump signed the largest single retrenchment of the American safety net in history, the aftershocks have collided with a war, a tariff regime, a gutted disaster corps, and a “super” El Niño barrelling toward landfall. Meanwhile, the White House is building a ballroom.
One year ago, in a Rose Garden ceremony held on the Fourth of July, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. He called it a birthday gift to America. A more accurate description came from the Congressional Budget Office, which projected that the law would strip health coverage from roughly 11.8 million Americans over a decade, cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding by $186 billion, add $4.7 trillion to the federal deficit, and shovel the savings toward tax cuts whose largest gains, by every independent analysis, accrue to households already at the top.
That single piece of legislation would have been enough to define a presidency. But it did not arrive in isolation. In the twelve months since, the Trump administration has waged an escalating war against Iran that has pushed gasoline to a four-year high; imposed the broadest tariff regime since 1947; gutted the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by roughly a third; watched consumer credit-card delinquencies climb to a fifteen-year peak; and presided over a national debt that has ballooned to $39 trillion. All of it is now converging with an intensifying “super” El Niño that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns could become the strongest such event on record.
Any one of these facts, in a different presidency, would dominate a news cycle. Together, they constitute what economists, epidemiologists, and climate scientists are increasingly describing in the same language: a perfect storm — a rare, compounding convergence of shocks against a nation whose institutional shock absorbers have been deliberately dismantled.
And in the middle of it, the president is building a ballroom.
I. The Bill and its Human Toll
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts more than $1 trillion — roughly 15 percent — from federal Medicaid spending over the next decade, according to Andrew Fieldhouse, a professor at Texas A&M’s Mays Business School. It cuts $186 billion, or 20 percent, from SNAP. It imposes 80-hour-per-month work reporting requirements on Medicaid expansion enrollees; requires eligibility redeterminations every six months instead of annually; ends the federal incentive for Medicaid expansion; and pushes 75 percent of SNAP administrative costs onto the states.
The projections are catastrophic and, at this point, no longer projections. A March 2026 Urban Institute analysis found that between 4.9 and 10.1 million people are projected to lose Medicaid coverage in 2028 alone. A RAND Corporation study published in February placed the ten-year figure at 7.6 million fewer Medicaid enrollees by 2034. The Congressional Budget Office puts total ten-year Medicaid coverage losses at 11.8 million, with 4.8 million of those attributable to work requirements alone.
The work requirements were sold to the public on the premise that Medicaid recipients are not working. This is false. More than nine in ten adults on Medicaid expansion already work, are looking for a job, attend school, are caring for family, or have a disability. The people who will lose coverage will lose it, in Urban Institute researcher Matthew Buettgens’s careful phrasing, not because they fail to meet the criteria, but because they fail to document their compliance to a bureaucracy designed to make documentation difficult. Between 19 and 37 percent of people who already work will lose coverage anyway.
The SNAP picture is already worse than the projections. Between February 2025 and February 2026, more than 4 million Americans lost SNAP benefits, according to Stateline’s analysis of federal data. The rolls dropped from 42 million in July 2025 to 39.5 million by December. As Salon documented in April, this is not because 3.3 million people escaped hunger in six months — it is because the administration engineered the friction that pushed them off.
CBO’s central estimate for Americans who will lose Medicaid coverage by 2034 under OBBBA, per the Center for Health Care Strategies.
Americans who lost SNAP benefits between February 2025 and February 2026 alone, per Stateline’s analysis of federal data.
Share of U.S. households reporting food insecurity in the New York Fed’s Feb. 2026 survey — worse than pandemic-era levels.
The amount OBBBA will add to federal deficits over 10 years, per CBO — with reduced immigration projected to add another $500 billion.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, speaking at a June 2025 press conference before the bill was even signed, warned that more than 37 million children rely on Medicaid and CHIP for essential health care, and that the bill’s new SNAP work reporting requirements would apply to parents of children — forcing kids to go hungry as their parents were kicked off benefits. Twelve months later, her warning reads as prophecy.
II. The Cost-of-Living Detonation
Even as the safety net was being torn, the cost of everything else was climbing. The Trump administration’s second-term tariff regime — announced on “Liberation Day” in April 2025 and expanded through the year via the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Section 232, and Section 122 — is, in the Tax Foundation’s assessment, the largest U.S. tax increase as a percent of GDP since 1993, amounting to an average tax hike of roughly $1,500 per household in 2026.
Harvard Kennedy School economists studying the 2025 tariff wave found that pass-through to U.S. import prices was nearly 100 percent — meaning American consumers, not foreign exporters, bore the cost. The Yale Budget Lab estimated the cumulative price hit at approximately 1.1 percent of consumer prices by April 2026, equivalent to a $1,500 annual burden on the median household. Manufacturing employment, the very sector the tariffs were meant to revive, was 89,000 jobs lower in February 2026 than in April 2025, when the worldwide tariffs took effect, according to NPR’s one-year retrospective.
Then in late February 2026, Trump launched airstrikes against Iran. The Strait of Hormuz — through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows daily — became an active war zone. Gasoline, which had been at $2.92 a gallon during Trump’s February State of the Union, spiked to $3.47 within ten days of the first strikes, kept climbing, and by this week hit a $4.00 national average, according to AAA data reported by The Hill. Diesel — the fuel that moves the entire American economy — spiked 34 cents in a single week in mid-July, its biggest jump since the war began.
“I think it’s fine. It’s a little glitch. We had to take this detour.”
— President Donald Trump, to ABC News, on soaring gasoline prices ten days into the Iran war
The president’s own Energy Department disagrees. The Energy Information Administration’s projections — published quietly after the war’s opening weeks — now project gasoline averaging $3.34 per gallon for 2026 and $3.18 for 2027, up sharply from the pre-war February forecast of $2.91 and $2.93. Behind the scenes, according to reporting sourced to two energy officials, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has been telling staffers to bring her any idea — any idea at all — that might bring pump prices down.
The pressure on households is now measurable in the credit data. In Q1 2026, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, total household debt neared a record $19 trillion. Credit card debt hit $1.25 trillion. And the share of credit card balances at least 90 days delinquent reached 13.12 percent — the highest level in fifteen years, the worst since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Auto loan 90-day delinquencies, at 5.6 percent, are the highest on record, period.
Analysts have a name for what is showing up in the data: survival debt. Consumers are not swiping cards to buy discretionary luxuries; they are swiping them to buy groceries, gas, and rent, and doing so at an average credit-card APR of 22.15 percent. Consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan’s monthly survey, has fallen to 44.8 — a lower reading than the Great Recession, and lower than the depths of the pandemic.
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III. Dismantling the Safety Net
The safety-net cuts written into OBBBA are only half of the story. The other half is the Department of Government Efficiency — the initiative launched in Trump’s first weeks and, in the eighteen months since, used as a battering ram against the federal agencies whose job is to keep Americans alive during crises.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a quarter of the workforce has been eliminated since January 2025, according to a survey conducted by public-health researchers between February and April 2026 and reported in The Conversation. The agency’s chronic-disease and injury-prevention programs, including those dedicated to women’s health, tobacco-use reduction, and violence prevention, have been quietly shuttered. In August 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after she refused to accept political interference with the agency’s scientific work. Nearly a year later, per Fortune’s reporting, the CDC still has no director, no principal deputy director, no chief of staff, and no chief medical officer.
The consequences are already showing. A sprawling cyclospora outbreak in July 2026 exposed what Semafor called “deep cracks in public health”. A major overseas Ebola outbreak with more than 1,100 confirmed cases was elevated to the agency’s highest response level in July, even as employees told Federal News Network that the CDC was “running on fumes.”
At the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the pattern is the same but sharper. According to Cascadia Daily News reporting, DOGE cut roughly 20 percent of FEMA’s staff in 2025, and DHS began the new year with what one FEMA worker called a “New Year’s Eve Massacre” — abrupt terminations of Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) employees who form the backbone of the agency’s operations during and after disasters. In some states, CORE employees make up 80 percent of those deployed in disaster support roles. As of mid-2026, FEMA has lost roughly a third of its workforce since Trump’s second term began.
On June 11, 2025, Trump made explicit what the cuts had already been doing implicitly: he said his administration would begin phasing out FEMA entirely after the current hurricane season. Congressman Greg Casar, in a formal letter to DHS, called this pattern reckless in the extreme, noting that the same administration had also cut surge staffers — the first federal boots on the ground during disasters — by an anticipated 85 percent.
“Beyond cruel to be treated in such a way. We know it as a fact that health employees were DOGE’d and were cut. Fewer resources, fewer people protecting our communities across the HHS spectrum is a reality.”
— Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), on the parasitic outbreak response and CDC cuts
IV. The Coming Storm — Literal and Otherwise
And now the weather turns. The 2026 El Niño is not a hypothetical. It is already here, already intensifying, and — in the consensus judgment of the world’s leading climate modeling agencies — is on track to become the strongest El Niño in the historical record.
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia reports that the Niño 3.4 sea-surface-temperature anomaly, centered on July 15, 2026, has climbed to +2.1°C. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, writing in his newsletter The Climate Brink, notes that every single major forecasting model — NOAA CFSv2, the European ECMWF, the Australian BOM, JAMSTEC’s SINTEX-F — now has its median peak in “very strong” territory, with all but one exceeding the 2015–16 record. The independent Weather West blog summarizes the NOAA Climate Prediction Center’s probabilities bluntly: an 88 percent chance of at least a strong El Niño by autumn or early winter — and a 63 percent chance it reaches “super” intensity.
What super El Niños do, historically, is reorganize the weather of the entire Northern Hemisphere. They fuel Pacific hurricanes, drought in the American West and Southeast, atmospheric river events on the West Coast, and — following the peak — a chain of secondary economic effects on agriculture, insurance markets, and global food supply. CNN’s coverage in early July noted that the model runs are only getting more alarming with each successive update.
This is the storm that will meet a gutted FEMA, a CDC without a director, a Medicaid system that just terminated benefits for millions, and a rural hospital network that is losing federal matching funds. The Center for American Progress notes that 2024 saw 27 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, second only to 2023’s record 28. A super El Niño year, layered on top of accelerating baseline climate change, will almost certainly break both records.
V. Ballrooms and Triumphal Arches
Set against this backdrop, the priorities of the administration itself are best measured not in policy papers but in poured concrete. In late October 2025, at the height of the Ebola scare, work crews demolished the East Wing of the White House — the wing that had housed the office of every First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt — to make way for what was initially advertised as a $200 million ballroom.
The price has since climbed. To $250 million by September 2025. To $300 million by October. And by December, President Trump himself acknowledged the figure had reached $400 million — double the original estimate. “We’re donating a $400 million ballroom and we got sued not to build it,” Trump told reporters, in a formulation that treated the White House itself as personal property. In December, the ballroom’s lead architect, James McCrery, stepped down amid reporting that he had been at odds with the president over its ever-expanding scale. The new architect will now design a space to seat 1,350.
Alongside the ballroom, the president announced in October 2025 that he would build a 250-foot triumphal arch — modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris — in the middle of Memorial Circle between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. Axios has reported the arch is likely to cost at least $100 million; the National Endowment for the Humanities has already allocated $15 million in taxpayer dollars toward the project. When CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe asked the president who the arch was for, Mr. Trump answered with a single word: “Me.”
It is worth stating plainly what this contrast means. In the same twelve months in which the administration cut $1 trillion from Medicaid, kicked 4 million people off food assistance, and terminated the federal survey that measured whether Americans were going hungry, the president was overseeing the demolition of the East Wing to build himself a ballroom and directing the National Endowment for the Humanities to help pay for a monument to himself.
VI. The Wall Street Mirage
The counterargument, of course, is the stock market. And it is true — up to a point. The S&P 500 has posted 24 record highs in 2026 and is up roughly 9.5 percent year-to-date, per CNN’s reporting. The Nasdaq is up nearly 13 percent. This is the number the administration cites at every turn.
What the administration does not cite is the composition of that rally. It is heavily concentrated in the “Magnificent Seven” mega-cap technology stocks and a handful of AI-adjacent semiconductor and hyperscaler names. Just five stocks account for roughly $16.4 trillion in combined market capitalization. In the words of Motley Fool’s analysis, the S&P 500 is trading at its highest valuation since the peak of the dot-com bubble — the last time the index reached such levels, it lost as much as 49 percent of its value and did not set a new high until 2007.
The labor market that underpins the real economy is telling a different story. The June 2026 jobs report showed just 57,000 payroll gains — half of what economists had expected — with April and May combined revised downward by 74,000. Average monthly job gains through the first half of 2026 have been roughly 92,000, per J.P. Morgan’s analysis — down from 122,000 in 2024. The Dallas Fed’s estimate of “break-even” employment growth, the pace needed to keep unemployment stable, has fallen to roughly zero. In the language of U.S. Bank’s July outlook, the labor market has settled into a “low-hire, low-fire” pattern — a stagnant middle that hides underneath a headline unemployment rate of 4.2 percent.
The gap between Wall Street and Main Street has rarely been wider, and it is the gap where a shock lands hardest. A super El Niño, a further escalation in Iran, a sharp AI-driven market correction, or the December 2026 activation of the OBBBA’s Medicaid work reporting requirements — any one of these could puncture the rally. Together, they very likely will.
The 25th Amendment and the Question of Fitness
Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination, provides that when the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet transmit a written declaration to Congress that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the Vice President immediately assumes those powers as Acting President. It has never been formally invoked in the amendment’s history.
It is being invoked now — in speech, if not yet in action. In January 2026, after Trump sent Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store a message linking U.S. policy toward Greenland to his failure to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called for the Cabinet to invoke Section 4. He was joined by Reps. Eric Swalwell and Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California, and Yassamin Ansari of Arizona — who described the president as “extremely mentally ill.” In April, after Trump posted a profanity-laced Easter Sunday threat to bomb Iranian civilian infrastructure, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois formally called on Vice President JD Vance and the Cabinet to invoke the amendment immediately. The nonpartisan watchdog Common Cause has since issued its own formal call for succession planning. Even former Republican congressman Joe Walsh has publicly demanded Section 4 be triggered.
The constitutional argument is not, strictly, one of medical diagnosis. The framers of the amendment deliberately used the word “unable” rather than “unfit” — precisely because they understood that the incapacity a president might display could be psychological, judgmental, or behavioral as much as physical. A pattern of erratic decision-making, of escalation in response to personal slight, of governance driven by monuments to self while agencies collapse — these fall within the amendment’s plain text.
The practical barriers are real. Section 4 requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — a Cabinet the president himself appointed and can, in principle, fire. Vice President Vance has shown no public appetite for the step; CNN reported on July 25 only that he and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine had raised concerns about escalating the Iran war in a White House meeting, not that he had contemplated Section 4. Even if invoked, the president can contest the declaration; Congress must then resolve the dispute by a two-thirds vote of both chambers. This is a mechanism designed to be difficult.
But the difficulty of the mechanism is not an argument against making the constitutional case. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment exists precisely for moments in which the ordinary political remedies — elections, impeachment, the discipline of a president’s own party — have failed. The evidence of the past twelve months — a war launched over a chokepoint the administration then admitted it had no plan to secure; a public safety-net dismantled in the midst of a converging health, economic, and climate crisis; a president who tells reporters a triumphal arch is being built for “me” — is not a matter of policy disagreement. It is a documented pattern of governance disconnected from consequence, and it is exactly the pattern the amendment’s authors had in mind.
Editorial Conclusion
A perfect storm is not a natural phenomenon. It is the collision of a hurricane with a coastline whose seawalls have been quietly deconstructed. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act tore down the seawall of Medicaid and SNAP. DOGE tore down the seawalls of the CDC and FEMA. The tariff regime and the Iran war are the winds now blowing in from the Pacific. And a super El Niño is the surge behind them. The president is holding a ribbon-cutting for his ballroom.
This is no longer a question of whether the administration is competent, or partisan, or ideologically hostile to government itself. It is a question of whether the constitutional order still contains a functioning mechanism for a president whose priorities have plainly detached from the survival needs of the country he governs. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was written for this moment. Congress, the Cabinet, and the Vice President should read it — and act.
Sources & References
- Texas Standard“Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ means loss of Medicaid and SNAP benefits for many Texans”
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation / Urban Institute“Millions Could Lose Medicaid Coverage Due to New Rules” (March 2026)
- Medical Daily / RAND“Medicaid Work Requirements Take Effect December 2026: 7.6M at Risk”
- Stateline“More Americans are hungry in the face of federal cuts, rising grocery prices”
- Fortune“More Americans face hunger as food insecurity rises, per New York Fed”
- Salon“Hunger is rising — by Republican design”
- Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand“Gillibrand Highlights Impact of Trump’s Big Beautiful Betrayal on NY Children and Families”
- Tax Foundation“Tracking the Economic Impact of the Trump Tariffs”
- Arete Wealth“Tariffs and Inflation: The Full Picture Through Mid-2026”
- NPR“Have Trump’s tariffs worked? Where things stand a year after ‘Liberation Day'”
- The Hill“Average price of gas hits $4 as Iran war heats back up”
- CNN“Iran war escalation nears 2-week mark” — live coverage
- Foreign Policy“Iran War: Why Oil Market Spikes Are More Likely Than Trump Believes”
- CNBC“Iran war energy shock hits the U.S. economy as gas and diesel prices climb”
- Student Borrower Protection Center“American Families Hit Record Levels of Financial Distress” (May 2026)
- The Conversation“How cuts to CDC are dismantling its capacity to protect Americans’ health”
- Fortune“‘We lost a lot of talent’: Former CDC COO on the DOGE cuts”
- Federal News Network“CDC ‘running on fumes’ as Ebola response elevated”
- Semafor“Parasitic infection outbreak exposes deep cracks in public health”
- Cascadia Daily News“Regional FEMA offices slashed by DOGE face further cuts”
- The Climate Brink (Zeke Hausfather)“The Strongest El Niño Ever”
- Columbia IRI“July 2026 ENSO Quick Look” — sea surface temperature anomaly at +2.1°C
- Weather West“Rising odds of a strong-to-historic El Niño event in 2026”
- CNN“This Super El Niño could end up being even worse than anticipated”
- CBS News“Reflecting Pool renovation, massive White House ballroom, and a triumphal arch”
- USA Today (via AOL)“Trump says projected White House ballroom cost doubled to $400 million”
- Common Cause“Trump is Unfit to Serve” — call to invoke the 25th Amendment
- Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi“Krishnamoorthi Calls for President Trump’s Removal Under 25th Amendment”
- TIME Magazine“What to Know About the 25th Amendment as Lawmakers Call for Its Use”
- Fortune“The national debt just crossed $39 trillion”
- Bureau of Labor Statistics“Employment Situation Summary — June 2026”
- CNN Business“S&P 500 up almost 10% this year, despite war, inflation and AI nerves”
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