Steve Daines, Tim Sheehy, Ryan Zinke, and Troy Downing were elected by Montanans to represent their interests and values and make the state better than ever. Instead, each has abandoned Montana by falling in step with Trump and voting for the MAGA Republican’s disastrous One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which is now law.
The Act will harm vulnerable Montanans and make both poor and middle-class families less prosperous and less healthy. It will increase both healthcare costs and the household cost of energy, cause the loss of thousands of jobs, shrink Montana’s GDP, and harm our pristine public lands. And it will increase the federal debt, making it nearly impossible for future generations to pay off.
To call these consequences catastrophic is no exaggeration.
Why did they vote for this terrible legislation? Simple—they feared Trump’s backlash and didn’t want to jeopardize their political careers or anger their wealthy out-of-state donors, who will be the biggest beneficiaries of the Act.
The Act’s provisions that will have the most serious consequences are the funding cuts in healthcare programs. These cuts represent the largest rollback of federal support for healthcare in American history. The Act terminates the subsidy for health insurance provided through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and substantially reduces funding for both Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This will harm the health and financial security of adults and children and adversely impact the healthcare and nursing care systems that Montanans rely on.
More than 77,000 Montanans have enrolled in ACA healthcare coverage. The loss of the subsidy will increase the premium cost for ACA health insurance by more than 28 percent, amounting to an additional $265 per year for many enrollees in Montana. Many self-employed individuals, small businesses, and working families in Montana who can’t afford this increased cost will become uninsured. For all Montanans, rich and poor alike, affordable health insurance is essential for financial security, access to essential healthcare services, and improved health outcomes for themselves and their families.
The cut in federal Medicaid, which is the single largest source of healthcare funding in Montana, will have outsized and negative impact on Medicaid recipients in this state. Over 200,000 Montanans are covered by Medicaid, and roughly sixty-five percent of these recipients live in rural areas. Two-thirds of nursing home residents in Montana are dependent on Medicaid to cover their costs. Montana stands to lose 32 percent of its federal Medicaid funding over the next 10 years, which is more than any other state. With this loss and Medicaid’s new work requirement, up to 38,000 Montanans stand to lose their Medicaid coverage.
And the cut in Medicaid funding extends far beyond the loss of healthcare coverage for individual Montanans. It will also result in inevitable increases in uncompensated care, forcing many Medicaid-dependent rural hospitals and nursing homes to reduce services or close. Montana has roughly 70 licensed nursing homes that accommodate more than 3,700 residents, and Medicaid accounts for 63 percent of the payment source for these facilities. Long distances between towns and health care facilities are already barriers to accessing health and nursing care in Montana, and closing of any of the rural hospitals and nursing homes will put many Montanans at risk of losing access to the essential care these facilities provide.
Another senseless aspect of the OBBBA is the added work requirement for Medicaid eligibility. Instead of eliminating fraud and abuse, it will only result in people who are unable to meet the requirement losing their Medicaid coverage. More than 93 percent of Montanans currently on Medicaid either already work, are disabled, are elderly, or are children. And those who don’t are often prevented by illness, caregiving responsibilities, or lack of jobs, which are hard to find and travel to in our vast rural state. Work requirements will also be expensive to administer, confusing, and burdensome – all costs that Montana will have to bear.
The cuts in SNAP funding will put Montana residents who rely on federal food assistance at risk of losing some or all of the benefit. Fifteen percent of Montana’s population is unable to acquire adequate food for one or more family member due to a lack of money or other resources. SNAP provides 9 out of every 10 meals for both adults and children in need of food assistance. The cut in SNAP funding will be especially harmful to those in rural areas of Montana where fewer alternative food sources are available to offset the cut in SNAP funding.
Because of rules designed to control federal spending when Congress passes and the President signs into law any legislation that creates a budget deficit, which the OBBBA does, these rules will trigger automatic cuts in Medicare funding. Unless Congress acts, Medicare funding will be cut by $45 billion this fiscal year, by $75 billion year in FY 2034, with a projected total 10-year cut of $490 billion. As of 2024, over 262,000 Montanans were on Medicare, accounting for 20 percent of the state’s population. The cuts in Medicare funding create a ticking time bomb that threatens Medicare’s long-term stability and the care it provides to thousands of Montanans. The blame for this rests entirely on a Republican Congress and President who wrote, passed, and signed this deficit-creating and debt-growing Act into law.
Instead of being honest about who wins and who loses from the Act, Republicans are trying to rebrand it by referring to it as the “Middle Class Tax Cut Bill.” But a more apt name for it is “The One Big Bonanza for the Wealthy Bill.” The benefits of both the tax cut provision and the increased estate tax exemption provision in the Act flow overwhelmingly to the wealthy, not poor or middle-class working people. The financial benefit of the tax cut provision alone to the average Montana millionaire is 66 times larger than that of the average middle-class Montanan.
The Act not only will make wealthy Montanans even more wealthy, but the poorest even poorer. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net effect of the Act’s tax reductions, cash transfers, and spending cut provisions will decrease the income of households in the lowest 10 percent of income distribution by $1,200 per year, and increase that of households in the middle of the distribution by only $800, which is equivalent to $15 per month, hardly a windfall for a working family. In contrast, households in the top 10 percent of the distribution will see their income increase by $13,600 per year, an amount that is 17 larger than that of households in the middle of income distribution as a direct result of provisions in this Act.
The GOP holds a long-standing mythical belief that giving the wealthy more money to spend by cutting their taxes will boost economic growth, increase tax revenues, and thereby pay for the tax cuts and avoid increasing the debt. They call it “trickle-down economics.” The reality, however, is that this economic theory has repeatedly failed to boost economic growth and prevent a debt increase. For instance, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which also mostly benefitted the wealthy, increased the federal debt by almost $2 trillion. The CBO’s projection is that the tax and spending provisions in the OBBBA will swell the debt by $4.1 trillion over the next decade and increase the annual interest cost to service that debt by $718 billion per year, which comes out of the pocket of taxpayers.
For decades, the GOP has demanded a balanced budget, even threatening government shutdowns unless their demands were met. Now, controlling both Congress and the Presidency, they disingenuously choose to explode the debt, shackling future generations to pay endless interest.
Daines, Sheehy, Zinke, and Downing surely knew the dangers. Their decision to delay the cuts in Medicaid funding until after the 2026 midterms is telling—they didn’t want voters to experience these consequences before the next election. If they genuinely believed in the Act’s merits, then why did they vote to delay enacting the Medicaid cuts?
Worse, had just one of them voted “No,” the OBBBA would not have passed—but not one of them did. They boast of removing the public land sales provision from early drafts of the Act. Kudos for that, but they needed to do far more. It’s like pulling one rattlesnake from a cellar full of them and declaring it safe. They aren’t trustworthy because they simply failed to meet their responsibility to both protect the most vulnerable Montanans and represent the interests and values of all residents of our state.
The Open Dialogue Discussion Group is a study group of self-organized local citizens who meet regularly to discuss current issues that directly or indirectly affect our state, our nation, and its’ people. The group includes Gregory Mueth of Kalispell, Jerry Elwood of Kalispell, Alex Berry of Kalispell, Robert Harris of Whitefish, Dan King of Bigfork, Bill Cox of Kalispell, Roy Caldwell of Kalispell, Lawrence “Max” Maxwell of Kalispell, Randy Ogle of Kalispell, Dennis Wasley of Lakeside, Fritz Royer of Kalispell and Pat Sherlock of Kalispell.