Bill

July 14 (UPI) — President Donald Trump said Sunday that the United States will send Ukraine Patriot air defense system munitions that the European Union will pay for.

Trump made the announcement to reporters during a press gaggle at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland after attending the Club World Cup final at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium.

He told reporters the number of Patriot munitions hasn’t been agreed on yet, but was adamant Europe was to pay for them.

“They’re going to have some because they do need protection, but the European Union is paying for,” he said. “We’re not paying anything for it, but we will send it.”

Trump incorrectly stated that the United States has given hundreds of billions more to Ukraine than the European Union, despite the U.S. government and the EU, along with its members states, having allocated comparable amounts.

According to the U.S. government, the United States has allocated $182.8 billion of which $83.4 billion has been disbursed. The EU states it and its members have given Ukraine $192.5 billion, and have allocated tens of billions more.

The United States is, however, still the largest single backer in Ukraine’s defense, though it has given very little aid to the war-torn country during the second Trump administration.

Trump has sought to have the EU pay more for Ukraine’s defense, and he told reporters Sunday that he has a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday, and that they will be sending “various pieces of very sophisticated” military equipment to Ukraine “and they’re going to pay us 100% for them.”

A pause on some U.S. military aid transfers to Ukraine put in place early this month was lifted by Trump as he has grown more frustrated with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump, who campaigned on ending the war within 24 hours of returning to the White House, has been seeking a cease-fire in the war since his inauguration, which has seemed to have hit a stalemate. Early this month, he had a phone call with Putin, after which he told reporters that he “didn’t make any progress” toward securing a cease-fire.

Since then, he has voiced frustration with the Russian leader, whom he once frequently praised.

“Putin really surprised a lot of people,” Trump said Sunday. “He talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening. There’s a bit of a problem there. I don’t like it.”

OK, I’ll say it. I’m sick of superheroes. I blame the Marvel Cinematic Universe (36 movies and counting over 17 years) and the DC Extended Universe (43 movies and counting, mostly since the late 1970s). Maybe Earth’s not big enough for two universes. They’re running pretty thin these days, down to rebooting reboots, making sequels for prequels and squeezing every ounce from the intellectual property tube to fill out streaming platform minutes.

But there’s always Superman. The Krypton-born alien, orphaned, sent off into space for survival and then raised by adoptive parents in Kansas. He’s now been with American pop culture for 10 decades (eight in film). Despite an outfit modeled after a circus strongman, he’s become a durable, transcendent symbol of the ultimate immigrant and somehow a simultaneous embodiment of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

Superman’s the classic American good guy, and so this weekend’s opening of the new “Superman” with David Corenswet is a great time to think about the real good guys and gals in American life — that is, if you can find any. Where are all the good guys and gals in America? What qualifies someone for the title these days?

The idea has definitely shifted. It’s as if by sheer screen volume the fake superheroes overwhelmed the public consciousness. Superheroes are dialed up so high we can’t hear what real heroes sound like anymore. A 2008 poll in Britain found almost a quarter thought Winston Churchill was fake, while a majority of Britons believed Sherlock Holmes was real.

We’ve become confused: We prefer to watch fake heroes on screen rather than expect real ones to emerge in life. And so the fake ones become the only kind of hero we recognize.

The historian Daniel Boorstin described this transition from heroism to fame in his 1961 book “The Image.” He noted that heroes in American history were typically known for great public contribution through immense difficulty and danger. It didn’t matter much what they looked like because their deeds had saved lives and mattered to so many.

But pictures and movies changed everything in the 20th century. Heroes became celebrities. We traded away enduring contributions to the public good in exchange for flimsy, flashy fame that works for a paycheck. Value over values; money over all.

This isn’t hard to see. Look at how college sports has been conquered by contracts and name-image-likeness deals. How law firms kowtowed to an administration making unprecedented demands. How media heavyweights keep bending knees to the same. And let’s not get started with social media “influencers” except to say that doing the right and honest thing has been swept aside by the twin tsunamis of popularity and the Almighty Buck.

Where’s our real truth, our real justice, our real American way?

Not in Congress. The “Big Beautiful Bill” is a perfect example. It might take a Mt. Rushmore makeover to honor the profound contributions to cowardice in the votes surrounding this act. Rep. Jeff Crank (R-Colo.) couldn’t vote fast enough to add trillions to the national debt despite arguing, less than a year ago, that Congress is “turning a blind eye to this $35 trillion in debt,” that it’s “unsustainable” and that “we have to get our fiscal house in order, and we have to do this for our children and our grandchildren.”

Or Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), long-time fiscal hawk on the debt, who repeatedly railed against the Big Beautiful Bill’s deficit spending in the final stretch. And then he voted for it.

Or Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), known for saying “we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid” because “slashing health insurance for the working poor” would be “both morally and politically suicidal.” That was in May. But come July, Hawley voted to cut Medicaid.

The final vote came down to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). In a mid-June town hall, she said, “I have made clear very early on that we cannot move forward with a bill that makes cuts to Medicaid.” And yet, despite the fact that nearly 40,000 Alaskans (more than 5% of the state’s population) will likely lose their healthcare coverage as a direct result of the bill, Murkowski caved.

Sarah Longwell, founder and publisher of the Bulwark, spared nothing in her criticism of Murkowski. She wrote that this one action “defines our pathetic political moment,” embodying:

“Selfishness: I’m taking care of me and mine, the rest of you can pound sand;

Lack of accountability: I know the bill is bad, hopefully someone else will fix it;

Cowardice: I’m scared of Trump and his voters and need to go-along to get along with my GOP colleagues;

Moral rot: I know the difference between right and wrong, and actively chose wrong.”

Not exactly Superman. Sounds more like Lex Luthor at his most self-serving and callous.

We don’t need someone faster than a speeding bullet in the House. We don’t need senators leaping tall buildings in a single bound. We don’t need Superman.

But we do need our Clark Kents and Lois Lanes to step up. We do need our real heroes right now. Maybe Crank or Roy or Hawley or Murkowski will see the movie this weekend. Maybe they’ll find some courage for the next vote.

Maybe.

ML Cavanaugh is the author of the forthcoming book “Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before.” @MLCavanaugh

In Sacramento, the Athletics are mired in last place, struggling to fill the minor league ballpark they call home. That does not mean our state capitol is lacking for some serious hardball.

California legislators, meet our old friend, Frank McCourt.

McCourt, the former Dodgers owner, first pitched a gondola from Union Station to Dodger Stadium in 2018. The most recent development, from May: An appellate court ordered a redo of the environmental impact report, citing two defects that needed to be remedied.

At the time, a project spokesman categorized those defects as “minor, technical matters” and said they could be “addressed quickly.”

In the event of another lawsuit challenging the gondola project on environmental grounds, McCourt and his team want to guarantee any such suit would be addressed quickly.

On Monday, state legislators are scheduled to consider a bill designed in part to put a 12-month limit on court proceedings related to environmental challenges to certain transit projects. The current challenge to the gondola project is 16 months old and counting.

The bill, in all its legislative prose, does not cite any specific project. However, a state senate analysis calls the gondola proposal “one project that would benefit.”

Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), the bill’s author, said he had not met with any of the lobbyists from the McCourt entities registered to do so. Wiener said he included the gondola-related language in the bill at the request of legislators from the Los Angeles area.

“To me, it was a no-brainer,” Wiener told me.

A rendering of the proposed gondola that would transport fans from Union Station to Dodger Stadium.

(LA Aerial Rapid Transit)

The larger purpose of the bill: cutting red tape for buses, bikes, trains, ferries and any other mode of transit that might get you out of your car. If a gondola can do that, he said, bring it on.

“We need more sustainable transit options in California,” he said. “We need to make it easier for people to get around without having to drive.

“When you get cars off the road, it benefits the people who don’t have to drive, but it also benefits drivers, because it means there are fewer drivers on the road.”

The Senate analysis listed 52 organizations in support of Wiener’s bill, none opposed. Weiner told me he had not heard from anyone in opposition.

That was concerning to Jon Christensen of the L.A. Parks Alliance, one of the two groups that filed the long-running environmental lawsuit against the gondola project.

Christensen, whose coalition recently scrambled to hire its own Sacramento lobbyists, said he has no problem with expediting legal proceedings. What he has a problem with, he said, is a bill that “singles out one billionaire’s project for favoritism.”

Nathan Click, the spokesman for Zero Emissions Transit (ZET), the nonprofit charged with building and operating the gondola, said the bill simply extends a provision of previous legislation.

“The vast majority of Angelenos want and deserve zero emission transit solutions that reduce traffic and cut harmful greenhouse gas emissions,” Click said.

Click declined to say why project proponents felt compelled to pursue inclusion in this legislation if the environmental challenge already had been reduced to what he had called “minor, technical matters” two months ago. Project opponents maintain ridership estimates for the gondola are overly optimistic.

In the end, what happens in Sacramento might not matter much.

The gondola project still requires approvals from the City Council, Caltrans, Metro and the state parks agency. The latest target for a grand opening — 2028, in time for the Olympic baseball tournament at Dodger Stadium — likely would require construction to begin next spring. No financing commitment has been announced for a project estimated to cost $385 million to $500 million — and that estimate undoubtedly has risen in the two years since it was shared publicly.

There is nothing improper or unusual about lobbyists advocating for the interests of big business, but it’s not cheap. Over the past five years, according to state records, McCourt’s gondola company has spent more than $500,000 to do so.

In a Congress addicted to bad ideas and bloated spending — something we saw again last week — it’s rare to find a tax policy with broad, bipartisan support that also happens to be good policy. Health savings accounts, known as HSAs, are one of those rare gems. They promote individual responsibility, reduce healthcare costs and enjoy overwhelming support from voters across the political spectrum.

The good news is that for all its flaws, the “Big Beautiful Bill” that was just signed by the president includes several expansions to the program.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need tax-protected healthcare savings accounts. The tax code wouldn’t punish saving in the first place. Income would only be taxed once and not a second time through taxes on returns generated by savings. Families could set aside money for future expenses without being hit with additional penalties.

But that’s not the tax system we have. The double taxation of saving discourages people from preparing for medical and other costs.

Ideally, individuals would also be able to make their own decisions about health. But for the past century, Congress has used the tax code to pressure workers into accepting employer-controlled health insurance by penalizing those of us who choose otherwise. As Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute has demonstrated, this system effectively strips workers of control over roughly $1 trillion of their income. Imagine the possibilities if we could each demand more value and accountability for our share.

HSAs offer a partial solution to both of these problems. They can shelter a small portion of income and allow people to make their own decisions about some healthcare purchases without the government penalizing them. Since their creation in 2003, HSAs have become a lifeline for nearly 40 million account holders.

The accounts are triple tax-advantaged: Contributions go in tax-free, grow tax-free and can be withdrawn tax-free for qualified medical expenses. They reward frugality, encourage price sensitivity (in a way most health insurance plans do not) and allow families to build health-related savings year after year.

Still, HSAs have benefited only a small segment of workers. To truly bring about individual healthcare freedom, it is essential that Congress expand them to everyone and end the preferential tax treatment for employer-based coverage. And to give credit where it’s due, Congress did indeed deliver on at least part of this agenda.

The House version of the budget included long-overdue HSA reforms, most notably a fix to a particularly maddening and regressive feature of current law: If you’re a working senior who needs to claim Social Security at 65 to make ends meet, you’re automatically enrolled in Medicare Part A — and disqualified from contributing to an HSA. A wealthier colleague who delays retirement can continue to enjoy tax-free contributions. Same job. Same employer. Different treatments based purely on wealth.

In addition to abolishing this injustice by allowing working seniors enrolled in Part A to remain eligible for HSA contributions, the House bill expanded the menu of healthcare options that can be paid for with HSA funds. It made gym memberships, personal training, preventive care and wellness among the new options — a smart, targeted reform.

Unfortunately, the Senate stripped many of the House’s reforms, but enough were retained in the final version of the bill for it to expand access to HSAs and make a significant difference.

Starting Jan. 1, 2026, Americans enrolled in Bronze or Catastrophic Affordable Care Act plans may contribute to HSAs — around 7.3 million people who previously lacked access in 2025. The bill also allows HSA funds to pay for direct primary care memberships — modernizing how Americans can save for and manage healthcare expenses — and makes permanent the ability of high-deductible health plans to waive the deductible for telehealth visits.

By some measures, these might be the most popular tax provisions in the entire package. As Cannon has pointed out, large majorities of Democrats (73%), Republicans (74%) and independents (65%) have shown past support for HSAs. A Luntz poll found 83% support for working seniors on Medicare to be allowed to contribute to HSAs.

In other words, this wasn’t just smart policy, it was a political layup.

There is still a lot of work to be done, such as delinking HSA eligibility from high-deductible plans entirely, expanding contribution limits and eliminating barriers for all Medicare recipients. These moves would further reduce tax-code distortions and reinforce a healthcare system rooted in choice and accountability.

Nevertheless, HSA reform is one instance of the “Big Beautiful Bill” producing good and popular policy.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill last year that could have led to reparations for Mexican American families forced from their homes in Chavez Ravine in the 1950s, few knew the Dodgers had weighed in.

Newsom’s explanation was brief. He supported making amends for the injustice that occurred when Los Angeles officials uprooted three communities, seizing land for a housing project that would ultimately fall through before selling it to the Dodgers to enable the team’s move from Brooklyn. But the governor didn’t like that the bill would create a state-level task force rather than a local commission.

“A task force to study the events that occurred should be established at the local level,” Newsom wrote.

But previously unreported records show that the Dodgers lobbied state officials on the bill — as did the baseball team’s previous owner, Frank McCourt, who still shares ownership of the Dodger Stadium parking lots. McCourt’s lobbyists at the time included a firm led by Newsom’s friend Jason Kinney, whose French Laundry birthday dinner Newsom infamously attended at the height of the pandemic.

The records show that the Dodgers and McCourt lobbied on Assembly Bill 1950 — but not what side they took, if any. Did they oppose the legislation? And if so, did that lead to Newsom’s veto? It’s hard to know, because neither the Dodgers nor McCourt responded to my requests for comment.

As for Newsom, a spokesperson told me the governor’s office wasn’t lobbied on the bill — despite McCourt’s real estate company reporting otherwise.

Whatever actually happened, the Dodgers’ involvement raises questions about what went on behind the scenes. The public deserves answers — especially now that President Trump’s immigration raids have placed the team in the political spotlight, forcing its owners to grapple with the political and cultural power they wield.

For nearly two weeks after federal agents began rounding up brown-skinned people across the region, the team refused to comment, despite its more-than-40%-Latino fan base. For many fans, the silence felt like a betrayal — particularly after the team’s recent visit with Trump. A Dodgers employee even told Latina musician Nezza not to sign the National Anthem in Spanish before a game. (She did it anyway.)

Only when immigration agents gathered outside the Dodger Stadium parking lots last month did the team finally show some backbone, denying the agents entry and pledging $1 million to assist local immigrant families.

I’ll get back to the ICE raids and reparations bill shortly. But first, let’s note that this is hardly the first time that the Dodgers have hesitated to stand for social justice — despite being the franchise of Jackie Robinson.

Since last summer, 28,000 people have signed a petition urging the team to end its relationship with oil company Phillips 66, which advertises its 76 brand gasoline throughout Dodger Stadium. State officials have accused the oil giant of participating in a “decades-long campaign” to cover up the climate crisis — a crisis that affects everybody but is especially harmful to low-income families and people of color, including L.A.’s Latino communities.

A 76 gasoline ad above the right-field scoreboard at Dodger Stadium, seen during a July 4 game against the Astros.

(Kevork Djansezian / Los Angeles Times)

In March, California Senate Majority Leader Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) called on the Dodgers to drop Phillips 66 as a sponsor. In a letter to controlling owner Mark Walter, she pointed out that Angelenos breathe some of the nation’s most polluted air. She also alluded to the link between fossil fuels and more devastating wildfires.

“For decades, the Dodgers have been ahead of the curve. On issues from banning cigarette ads to making history by signing Jackie Robinson, this team has occupied a unique place in American sports,” Gonzalez wrote.

How have the Dodgers responded? At least publicly, they haven’t. Every time I’ve written about Phillips 66, they’ve declined to respond. I suspect they’re hoping the whole issue will just go away.

News flash: It’s not going away. Especially after the ICE raids.

To understand the connection between immigration and environmental justice, I’d recommend listening to Alicia Rivera. She’s an organizer with Communities for a Better Environment, and she’s spoken at rallies outside Dodger Stadium protesting Phillips 66. Even before Trump launched his harsh anti-immigrant crackdown last month, she was explaining how deportations and dirty air are part of the same system of injustices.

As drivers entered the Dodger Stadium parking lots before a game in May, she talked about her young grandson, and her fears over what kind of world he would inherit: How much worse would wildfires get? Would fossil-fueled weather disasters in other countries prompt even more refugees to flee to the U.S.?

“Workers are being detained, arrested in the middle of the street, people who don’t even identify themselves are deporting them. And these oil companies have been complicit in denying us to know the truth, paying millions to pay so-called scientists to deny that their products have caused climate change,” Rivera said.

When I asked Rivera if dumping 76 would be a worthy response to the ICE raids — a way for the Dodgers to show that they care about Latino fans — she had a simple answer: “Of course. That would be a major breakthrough.”

“I see a consistent pattern of disregard for the well-being of the people they are profiting from,” she said.

Community organizer Alicia Rivera speaks at a rally outside Dodger Stadium on Sept. 22.

(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)

That pattern arguably goes back decades.

The Chavez Ravine bill wouldn’t have forced the Dodgers to pay a cent to displaced families or their descendants; all it would have done is create a task force to study reparations. But the team has long shied away from so much as discussing the land’s grim backstory.

Only five entities paid lobbyists to weigh in on AB 1950, per an open-source database that compiles state records. Two of them — Fieldstead and Co. and Inclusive Action for the City — went on record supporting the legislation. I confirmed that a third group, the Western Center on Law & Poverty, was also in support.

Only the Dodgers and McCourt’s real estate company, McCourt Partners, haven’t publicly taken a stance.

The Dodgers lobbied the Legislature on AB 1950, while McCourt lobbied both the Legislature and the governor’s office, the records show.

Again, it’s tough to know what happened behind the scenes. Lawmakers passed the bill overwhelmingly, but only after a Senate committee nixed plans for a local task force — exactly what Newsom claimed he wanted.

As far as Wendy Carrillo is concerned, though, the lobbying records speak for themselves.

Carrillo was the state Assembly member, no longer in office, who wrote AB 1950. When I told her what I’d learned, she was outraged. She felt the records confirmed her suspicion that the Dodgers helped kill the bill.

She accused the team of “being disconnected from the very fan base that they have.”

“That same criticism can be made toward their visit to Trump at the White House, and their lack of understanding this moment in Los Angeles amid the growing ICE raids,” Carrillo said.

Dodgers owner Mark Walter looks on as President Trump speaks at the White House in April. The team visited Washington, D.C., to celebrate its 2024 World Series championship.

(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Indeed, many fans are far from satisfied with the team’s response to Trump’s cruelty. Which is no surprise, given that the Dodgers still seem eager to avoid angering Trump. Team president Stan Kasten was maddeningly vague in his statement touting the $1 million for immigrants, describing the raids as “what’s happening in Los Angeles” and acknowledging only that said happenings have “reverberated among thousands upon thousands of people.”

In contrast, L.A. women’s soccer team Angel City spoke up immediately about the “fear and uncertainty” created by the raids. Its players wore “Immigrant City Football Club” shirts that declared, “Los Angeles is for everyone.”

To Carrillo, the Dodgers’ latest failure to show true solidarity with its Latino fan base is another manifestation of the team’s original sin — its decades-long refusal to acknowledge the Mexican American communities of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde, which were bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium.

Carrillo, who’s running for state Senate in a district that would include Dodger Stadium, wants Walter and his co-owners — who include basketball legend Magic Johnson and tennis star Billie Jean King — to support a memorial for displaced Chavez Ravine families. And to offer more vocal support for persecuted immigrants today.

The team said its $1 million in donations would be followed by “additional announcements.” So far, crickets.

Owning up to Chavez Ravine’s sordid history would be a great step. So would getting rid of the 76 ads.

Both actions would infuriate the MAGA crowd — but so would just about anything the Dodgers might do in response to the ICE raids. In fact, the backlash has already started. A group co-founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, has filed a civil rights complaint against the Dodgers.

Whatever they do next, the Dodgers will make some enemies. Just like they did when they signed Jackie Robinson and broke baseball’s color barrier. The only question is whether they’ll once again stand for justice.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our “Boiling Point” podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

July 8 (UPI) — A federal judge has awarded Planned Parenthood a win over the Trump administration, halting a provision in President Donald Trump‘s massive tax cuts and benefits bill that prevents patients from using Medicaid at its healthcare facilities.

Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts issued her temporary restraining order Monday evening, ordering the Trump administration to take “all steps necessary to ensure that Medicaid funding continues to be disbursed in the customary manner and timeframes to Planned Parenthood Federation and its members.”

The ruling came hours after Planned Parenthood filed its lawsuit against a provision in Trump’s policy bill that puts in place a one-year ban on Medicaid payments to healthcare nonprofits that provide abortion services while receiving more than $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements in fiscal year 2023.

The nonprofit family medical provider accused the Trump administration of unlawfully targeting it with the so-called defund provision.

It said the provision’s purpose was to specifically “punish” Planned Parenthood for advocating for and providing legal abortion access outside of the Medicaid program and without using federal funds.

The lawsuit added that the provision was made specifically to target Planned Parenthood as those who would be affected by it are “almost entirely” its members.

“And if there were any doubt, President Trump, Speaker [Mike] Johnson and their allies have been promising to ‘defund Planned Parenthood’ for years now,” the lawsuit states. “That is what the Defund Provision does.”

According to the lawsuit, if the provision is allowed to stand, it would threaten the healthcare of more than 1 million Americans who use Medicaid as their insurance at Planned Parenthood centers for care ranging from birth control to cancer screenings.

“The Defund Provision is a naked attempt to leverage the government’s spending power to attack and penalize Planned Parenthood and impermissibly single it out for unfavorable treatment,” the lawsuit states.

“It does so not only because of Planned Parenthood members’ long history of providing legal abortions to patients across the country, but also because of Planned Parenthood’s unique role in advocating for policies to protect and expand access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, including abortion.”

In a statement following the ruling, Planned Parenthood said it was “grateful” for the swift action.

“In states across the country, providers have been forced to turn away patients who use Medicaid to get basic sexual and reproductive healthcare because President Trump and his backers in Congress passed a law to block them from going to Planned Parenthood,” it said on Threads.

“The fight is just beginning, and we look forward to our day in court!”

Last year, the party committed to widen public access to major sporting events by ensuring more are available to view without subscription TV packages. It says it favours a similar approach to one taken in Spain where La Liga must offer one free game a week to fans after a change in the law in 2022.

Max Wilkinson MP, Lib Dem spokesperson for Culture, Media and Sport said: “I’m urging MPs of all stripes to back our amendment to tear down the paywall and make Premier League games available on free to air channels.

“For too long, the jewel in the crown of British football has been locked behind an expensive barrier that keeps fans out while lining the pockets of broadcasters.

“That must end today – with a free-to-air revolution that gives the Premier League back to the country.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said: “The government has no plans to review the listed events regime.”

The Premier League declined to comment.

The legislation has now reached the report stage in the House of Commons.

A similar amendment was tabled at the committee stage last month.

At the time, the Sports Minister Stephanie Peacock said: “The listed events regime have protected key moments such as the FA Cup Final while ensuring that the Premier League, EFL & FA are able to raise billions of pounds annually, which is invested back into the pyramid.

“We all want to see more matches being televised free-to-air, but that must be balanced against that investment and not risk it… It would not be appropriate for the regulator to intervene in commercial decisions between the relevant broadcasters and rights holders.”

The Lib Dems claim analysis of subscription prices shows that to watch each available Premier League game live next season fans will have to pay £660 a year.

Last month, it was revealed Premier League television viewing figures on main live rights-holder Sky Sports were down 10% last season, while TNT Sports had a 17% reduction in its year-on-year figures.

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — Elon Musk said he’s carrying out his threat to form a new political party after his fissure with President Trump, announcing the America Party in response to the president’s sweeping tax cuts law.

Musk, once an ever-present ally to Trump as he headed up the White House advisory team, which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, broke with the Republican president over his signature legislation, which was signed into law Friday.

As the bill made its way through Congress, Musk threatened to form the “America Party” if “this insane spending bill passes.”

“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Musk said Saturday on X, the social media company he owns. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

The formation of new political parties is not uncommon, but they typically struggle to pull any significant support away from the Republican and Democratic parties. But Musk, the world’s richest man who spent at least $250 million supporting Trump in the 2024 election, could affect the 2026 elections determining control of Congress if he is willing to spend significant amounts of money.

His reignited feud with the president could also be costly for Musk, whose businesses rely on billions of dollars in government contracts and publicly traded company Tesla has taken a hit in the market.

It wasn’t clear whether Musk had taken steps to formally create the new political party. Spokespeople for Musk and his political action committee, America PAC, didn’t immediately comment Sunday.

As of Sunday morning, there were multiple political parties listed in the Federal Election Commission database that had been formed in the the hours since Musk’s Saturday X post with versions of “America Party” of “DOGE” or “X” in the name, or Musk listed among people affiliated with the entity.

But none appeared to be authentic, listing contacts for the organization as email addresses such as ” [email protected]″ or untraceable Protonmail addresses.

Musk on Sunday spent the morning on X taking feedback from users about the party and indicated he’d use the party to get involved in the 2026 midterm elections.

Last month, he threatened to try to oust every member of Congress who voted for Trump’s bill. Musk had called the tax breaks and spending cuts package a “disgusting abomination,” warning it would increase the federal deficit, among other critiques.

“The Republican Party has a clean sweep of the executive, legislative and judicial branches and STILL had the nerve to massively increase the size of government, expanding the national debt by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS,” Musk said Sunday on X.

His critiques of the bill and move to form a political party mark a reversal from May, when his time in the White House was winding down and the head of rocket company SpaceX and electric vehicle maker Tesla said he would spend “a lot less” on politics in the future.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who clashed with Musk while he ran DOGE, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that DOGE’s “principles” were popular but “if you look at the polling, Elon was not.”

“I imagine that those board of directors did not like this announcement yesterday and will be encouraging him to focus on his business activities, not his political activities,” he said.

Price writes for the Associated Press.

Fighter jets whooshed by and a stealth bomber streaked through the air during Friday’s annual White House Fourth of July picnic.

The display of might outside was unmistakable, as was the soft power inside the building.

President Donald J. Trump signed into law his nearly 900-page “Big Beautiful Bill” of tax breaks and spending cuts, affecting millions of Medicaid recipients while growing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency by thousands of workers.

The Senate passed the bill earlier in the week, while the Republican-controlled House voted 218-214 in favor of it on Thursday evening, with all Democrats and two Republicans opposed.

Now that the bill is in effect, it’s a good time to review what’s actually inside.

Times and Associated Press reporters broke down what the passage of the bill means for the country.

Tax cuts take center stage

The BBB contains roughly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, according to the Associated Press, and solidified the ones from Trump’s first term.

On the teeter-totter of benefits, the wealthiest families will enjoy an average of $12,000 in tax savings, while the poorest people will have to pay an additional $1,600 a year, on average, mainly due to reductions in Medicaid and food aid.

That analysis of the House version of the bill is is according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

While temporarily adding new tax deductions on tips, overtime and auto loans, the bill also adds a $6,000 deduction for older adults making less than $75,000 a year.

The child tax credit is bumped from $2,000 to $2,200, though millions of lower income families will still be unable to get the full credit.

Caps for state and local tax deductions, known as SALT, will quadruple to $40,000 for five years, offering some benefits to residents of higher-taxed states like California.

Businesses will get a break because they will immediately be able to write off 100% of the cost of equipment and research, which some experts say will boost economic growth.

Deportations, a border wall and missile defense

Another $350 billion is being allocated for border and national security, which includes spending on the U.S.-Mexico border and 100,000 migrant detention beds.

ICE will receive funding to offer $10,000 signing bonuses to new employees, with the aim of hiring 10,000 officers and agents.

Immigrants will fund some of these projects by paying new or increased fees, including when they apply for asylum.

In total, the Department of Defense will receive roughly $1 billion in new funding for border security.

Another $25 billion is being set aside for the U.S. to develop its own Israel-type of Iron Dome missile defense system, called the “Golden Dome.”

Clean energy gets pummeled

Previous tax breaks meant to create incentives for wind and solar energy are being hacked dramatically.

One incentive that will soon disappear is the electric vehicle tax break of $7,500 for new vehicles and $4,000 for used ones.

That was supposed to initially expire in 2032. Instead, the credit sunsets on Sept. 30.

How is this being paid for?

Republicans are cutting back on Medicaid and food assistance programs for those below the poverty line.

Many adults receiving Medicaid and food stamps, including those up to age 65, will now have to fulfill an 80-hour-a-month work requirement.

Medicaid patients will also have a new $35 co-payment to contend with.

About 71 million Americans use Medicaid, and 40 million benefit from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, commonly known as food stamps.

The CBO estimates that 11.8 million Americans will become uninsured by 2034, and 3 million more will not qualify for SNAP due to the changes.

For more on the bill, read our full report here.

The week’s biggest stories

(Chris Pizzello / Invision / AP)

Trump administration pushback

Fires and wildfires

Crime, courts and policing

More big stories

This week’s must-reads

More great reads

For your weekend

(Illustrations by Lindsey Made This; photograph by Greg Swales)

Going out

Staying in

L.A. Affairs

Get wrapped up in tantalizing stories about dating, relationships and marriage.

Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team

Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Andrew J. Campa, reporter
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to [email protected]. Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

United States President Donald Trump’s signature piece of budget legislation, the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, will likely raise healthcare costs, experts have said. While the Medicaid cuts will directly impact those who depend on the programme, the consequences will extend to others as well.

The 869-page bill, which includes roughly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade, passed in the House along party lines, with only two Republicans – Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania – breaking ranks. It will be signed into law by Trump on Friday.

In addition to patients, Medicaid funds also help financially strapped hospitals and other healthcare facilities, and the cuts could lead to their closures.

Apart from this, almost 12 million people could lose health insurance by 2034 due to reductions to both Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplace, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis.

Experts warn the new law will drive up costs elsewhere in the system. Patients may face higher out-of-pocket expenses, while hospitals could be forced to lower the quality of care, raise prices, or close entirely due to the financial strain.

“There is the mistaken belief that cuts in Medicaid will only affect those on Medicaid. Many hospitals, clinics, and healthcare organisations depend on Medicaid funding for their operations. Therefore, cuts in Medicaid can adversely affect the types and quality of services they provide,” Bruce Y Lee, professor of health policy at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, told Al Jazeera.

“In fact, a number of healthcare organisations depend so heavily on Medicaid funding that they could go out of business with significant cuts.”

The cuts would hit rural hospitals hard, according to an analysis from the National Rural Hospital Association (NRHA). About 20 percent of the US population lives in rural areas, where Medicaid covers one in four adults, a higher share than in urban areas, and plays a large part in financing healthcare services.

The cuts are expected to result in a 20 percent reduction in funding for rural hospitals in half of all states.

That will hurt patients like Martha Previte and her partner Jim Earl, who live in rural Maine. Both have type 1 diabetes and rely on regular hospital visits for a range of procedures, including blood tests and kidney treatment.

“I fear that these cuts are going to close hospitals that we rely on to get care, and we’re not going to have anywhere to go,” Previte told Al Jazeera.

This bill could result in as many as 338 hospitals closing around the US. There are already nearly 800 hospitals that are facing financial hardship.

“Our goal is to help ensure hospitals can remain open for their communities, and people can get the care they need when they need it. Our nation’s health and economic future depend on it,” the American Hospital Association said in a statement condemning the bill’s passage and calling it “an extremely disappointing and very difficult day for health care in America”.

Those that stay open could result in cuts to essential care like chemotherapy and behavioural health services.

The bill does include $50bn for rural hospitals to offset the additional financial strain they will face. But because of cuts to Medicaid, that funding will not make enough of a dent to keep healthcare costs from rising and healthcare facilities from shuttering.

Analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that Medicaid cuts would still lead to a drop of $155bn in federal Medicaid spending on rural hospitals over the next 10 years.

“While the President promised to lower costs for Americans, this bill is set to spike premiums and other healthcare costs,” Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative, told Al Jazeera.

Rural hospitals in the state of Missouri will be the hardest hit and are expected to lose an average of 29 percent of Medicaid funding. While Missouri’s Senator Josh Hawley, in a May op-ed in the New York Times, said cuts to Medicaid would be “politically suicidal”, he and his fellow Missouri senator, Republican Eric Schmitt, voted in support of the bill before it moved to the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

The cuts are also expected to affect nursing homes disproportionately in urban areas, according to an analysis from Brown University School of Public Health, which forecast that 579 nursing homes could shutter. Those at highest risk have a Medicaid payer share greater than 85 percent. It was found that the Medicaid cuts overwhelmingly affected nursing homes in California, Georgia, Illinois and Texas.

Looming Medicare changes

Medicaid is not the only healthcare programme seeing cuts. While Medicaid is intended for those who are low-income, Medicare covers healthcare for those 65 and older, as well as some others who have disabilities. Some patients, like Previte, receive both.

“Medicare is my primary insurer, and Medicaid picks up what Medicare does not cover. I am a type 1 insulin-dependent diabetic of 41 years with serious complications. Medicare covered my recent hospitalisation and upcoming outpatient procedures,” Previte told Al Jazeera.

The Republican bill could also indirectly lead to cuts in Medicare services because of the statutory Pay‑As‑You‑Go Act of 2010. Under this, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is required to keep a “scorecard” to track net increases to the deficit, with a goal to “eliminate the overage”.

Because of that, the programme may not get all of the money allocated to it, a potential $490bn loss in access to funds over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, affecting coverage for people who rely on Medicare.

“The whole thing [the tax bill] is a stark abandonment of human social responsibility,” Previte’s partner Earl said.

Affordable Care Act changes

The upcoming law also makes significant changes to the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. It shortens the annual enrollment period for healthcare coverage by about a month and drives up premium costs for those who need it.

According to analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation, insurance premium prices could increase on average by $1,296 a year.

Those who get their healthcare coverage through the exchange will also need to annually update their personal information, which includes income and immigration status, rather than being enrolled automatically.

The changes will cause a strain on the small business economy. Last year, as many as 3.3 million self-employed individuals and small business owners relied on the marketplace for health insurance.

“If you’re a young business owner, already stretched thin by housing costs, child care bills, and health premiums, this bill just made your future harder,” Richard Trent, executive director of Main Street Alliance, an advocacy group for small businesses, said in a statement.

Former President Barack Obama, in a post on X, weighed in as the bill strips parts of his signature policy, a key part of his legacy.

“It will increase costs and hurt working class families for generations to come,” the former president said in a post before the bill’s passage.

“This will be another branch of a limb of a disastrous tree. I’m concerned about what this means for our future care. The thing with diabetes, like many ailments, they’re livable if they’re treated properly. You can live a long, happy, healthy life, but when you’re deprived of healthcare, maintenance-of-health care, and things like that, then a whole Pandora’s box of disasters can happen to your health,” Earl added.

July 4 (UPI) — President Donald Trump signed into law House Resolution 1, which he called “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” while hosting a Military Family Picnic event at the White House on Friday evening.

The bill signing included a flyover of a pair of F-35 fighters escorting a B-2 Spirit bomber, which is the same type that dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21.

Some 150 airmen and airwomen from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri were among the military members and their families who attended the picnic and bill signing.

“The American people gave us a historic mandate in November,” Trump said of his election victory over former Vice President Kamala Harris.

A triumph of democracy

Trump called the bill’s passage a “triumph of democracy on the birthday of democracy,” and said it is “the most popular bill ever signed in the history of our country.”

It includes the single largest tax cut, the largest spending cut and the largest border security investment in U.S. history, the president said.

He said the measure modernizes the military, funds the creation of a” golden dome” national air defense system and drives economic growth.

“This bill will fuel massive economic growth and lift up the hardworking citizens who make this country run — the factory workers, farmers, mechanics, waiters, waitresses, police officers, firefighters, coal miners [and] truck drivers,” Trump said.

The bill makes tax cuts permanent, including no tax on tips, overtime and Social Security, the president said.

It also makes the child tax credit permanent, creates a tax deduction on the interest paid on the purchase of new U.S.-made vehicles and eliminates the estate tax on family farms and small businesses.

The ‘Golden Age’ of America

Trump said the bill cuts taxes on new businesses and existing ones that build and expand their operations.

“We have hundreds of factories, including car plants and [artificial intelligence], coming into our country at levels we have never seen,” he told the audience.

“Not only will we have the strongest economy on Earth, we also will have the strongest borders,” Trump said, adding that there were no recorded illegal border crossings into the United States in June.

“We are creating an economy that delivers wealth for the middle class, a border that is sovereign and secure, and a military that is unmatched[and] unequaled anywhere in the world,” Trump said.

“The Golden Age of America is upon us,” the president said. “It’s going to be a period of time, the likes of which … the country has never experienced before.”

Lawmakers were thanked ahead of signing

Trump thanked House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and other Republican lawmakers who were among those in attendance for delivering the bill for signing on Independence Day.

The controversial measure provides funding for the federal government for fiscal year 2026, which begins on Oct. 1, but adds an estimated $3.4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.

Trump said it reduces spending by $1.7 trillion while also delivering the “largest tax cut” in the nation’s history.

Trump delivered the 25-minute speech from the south portico of the White House and signed the bill into law from a small desk placed outside, while surrounded by supporters at 5:45 p.m. EDT

Johnson then presented the gavel used when the House passed the bill on Thursday.

Trump accepted the gavel and banged it several times on the small desk to conclude the signing and end the bill’s legislative journey on Capitol Hill.

Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump has signed his signature tax and spending bill, capping a months-long push to codify his top policy priorities into law.

The sweeping bill has prompted controversy among both Democrats and members of Trump’s own Republican Party for its deep cuts to social safety programmes and the hefty sum its tax cuts and spending are expected to add to the national debt.

Recent polls have also shown tanking public support for the legislation – which Trump calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill” – as many of its provisions come to light.

Still, Trump on Friday took nothing short of a victory lap, hosting a White House signing ceremony aligned with the Independence Day celebrations in Washington, DC.

The address began with a flyover from a B-2 Spirit bomber, the same jet used in US strikes on Iran last month.

“The last two weeks, there has never been anything like it as far as winning, winning, winning,” Trump said from the White House balcony.

“I want to tell you that I’ve never seen people so happy in our country, because so many different groups of people are being taken care of.”

He also took a moment to revisit his victory in the 2024 election and reiterate his belief that voters gave him an ironclad mandate to carry out his policy agenda. He signed the bill flanked by Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson and Representative Steve Scalise.

“The American people gave us a historic mandate in November,” Trump said. “This is a triumph of democracy on the birthday of democracy.”

Opponents, meanwhile, used the occasion to again condemn the bill, with the top Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, again saying that the sweeping legislation is “betraying” US citizens.

“This bill isn’t freedom. This bill isn’t independence. This bill is betrayal,” Schumer wrote on the social media platform X.

A months-long journey

The legislation represents the most substantial salvo yet in Trump’s policy blitz, in which he has mostly relied on more presidential orders than on congressional action.

The passage of his mega-bill underscores the president’s deep hold on the Republican Party, which has largely been remade in his likeness since his first term from 2017 to 2021. The party currently controls both chambers of Congress.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” is set to add an estimated $3.3 trillion to the national debt, an increase that might once have been considered a sacrilege for the party’s fiscal hawks.

It also tightens eligibility for the low-income healthcare programme Medicaid and the food assistance programme SNAP, in a move that could hurt Republicans facing tough re-election campaigns.

Still, in the end, only three Republicans in the Senate and two in the House were willing to break from Trump, in both cases leaving opponents just short of the votes needed to scuttle the bill.

For their part, Democrats were unified in their opposition.

In a last-ditch and largely symbolic effort on Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries embarked on a record-breaking speech to delay any voting on the bill.

Over the next eight hours and 45 minutes, Jeffries condemned Republicans for rushing to meet Trump’s July 4 deadline, accusing them of fast-tracking a bill that many conservatives had publicly voiced discomfort towards.

“We don’t work for Donald Trump. We work for the American people,” he said at one point. “That’s why we’re right here now, on the floor of the House of Representatives, standing up for the American people.”

He maintained Republicans would be punished at the ballot box over the bill during the midterm elections in 2026.

A wide-ranging bill

The legislation covers a range of issues, from immigration to tax reforms. For example, it extends sweeping tax cuts passed in 2017 during Trump’s first term, amounting to a total of $4.5 trillion in tax reductions.

It also allows taxpayers to deduct income earned from tips and overtime, as well as interest paid on loans for buying cars made in the US, while raising exemptions on estate taxes. It also extends a child tax credit.

The administration has hailed the cuts as a victory for working-class Americans, although several analyses have found that wealthier taxpayers are most likely to benefit.

Gains for lower-income taxpayers are likely to be offset by healthcare and food assistance cuts, according to Yale University’s Budget Lab.

All told, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, about 11.8 million more Americans will be uninsured over the next 10 years due to the Medicaid cuts, with another 4.2 million to lose health insurance due to cuts to pandemic-era subsidies.

The legislation also peels back green energy and electric vehicle tax incentives, part of Trump’s wider push to pivot away from clean energy and towards the influential fossil fuel industry.

It allocates $170bn for immigration and border enforcement funding, in what the American Immigration Council calls the “largest investment in detention and deportation in US history”.

Nonpartisan analysts have said the increase in the national debt from the spending has the potential to slow economic growth, raise borrowing costs and crowd out other government spending in the years ahead.

But on Friday, Trump dismissed the criticism.

“They [Democrats] have developed a standard line: ‘We can’t let them get away with it. It’s dangerous. Everybody’s going to die,’” Trump said. “It’s actually just the opposite. Everybody’s going to live.”

“After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship, economically.”

Lawrence Herrera started carrying a folded-up copy of his birth certificate in his wallet last week. He also saved a picture of his passport on his phone’s camera roll.

For the 67-year-old Atwater Village resident who was born and raised here, the precaution felt silly. But he’s not taking any chances.

“I started hearing, ‘He’s taking anyone and everyone,’” Herrara said, referrring to President Trump’s immigration crackdown. “I thought, ‘You know what? That could be me.’”

Herrera was one of hundreds of protesters who spent Fourth of July in downtown Los Angeles to rally against the immigration raids that have roiled the region and the surge in federal funding approved this week to keep them going. Many on the street said they were skipping the barbecues and fireworks this year. Instead, they showed up at City Hall, some in costumes or wrapped in flags. A 15-foot balloon of Trump in a Russian military uniform sat in Grand Park.

Erica Ortiz, 49, was dressed as Lady Liberty in shackles. Herrera wore a Revolutionary War outfit covered in anti-Trump pins that he said was appropriate for the occasion.

“Guess what? We have no independence right now,” he said. “That’s why we’re out here.”

1

2

3

1. Elizabeth Natividad wears a dress representing Lady Justice on the steps of City Hall . 2. Nancy Gonzalez poses in an outfit showing her Mexican heritageon the steps of City Hall. 3. A protester wearing a dress representing Lady Liberty holds her fist in the air on the steps of City Hall at a rally against the ongoing ICE raids taking place in the city on Friday, July 4, 2025 in Los Angeles, CA.

They marched through Olvera Street and outside the Federal Building, which houses the immigration court, waving signs. Several police officers were monitoring the protest but kept their distance during the gathering, which lasted a few hours.

“No more occupation! No more deportation!” the protesters chanted.

At the Federal Building, military personnel members lined up shoulder-to-shoulder guarding the property with shields and guns.

Jacob Moreno, a high school English teacher from Rialto, held a sign that called the day a “funeral for the freedom we pretend” still exists. He said the mood felt more solemn than the “No Kings” demonstration last month, which he attributed to the passage of Trump’s budget bill. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill adds roughly $150 billion to carry out mass deportations and fund border enforcement.

“This situation, this occupation is only going to get worse,” Moreno said. The 50-year-old said some of his students and their family members are undocumented. He and his daughter, a 16-year-old student, are helping set up a program to provide school supplies and hygiene items to students whose parents may be too afraid to go to work.

“I’m here to support my students, my community, and ultimately to stand on the right side of history,” he said.

Cristina Muñoz Brown, of North Hollywood, shared a similar sentiment.

“I’m desperate for my people, I’m desperate to show up,” she said. Since the raids began, she said, the Fashion District where she works in the costume industry is a “ghost town.”

An American flag passes by marines standing guard during a rally against the ongoing ICE raids taking place in the city at the Federal Building on Friday, July 4, 2025 in Los Angeles, CA.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers stand guard during a rally against the ongoing ICE raids taking place in the city at the Federal Building on Friday, July 4, 2025.

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles) addressed the crowd outside City Hall, calling the budget bill the “Big Beautiful Scam.”

“Immigration spending in this country is now more than the military spending of 165 countries around the world. ICE has more money than the city of Los Angeles 10 times over,” he said as the crowd booed. “That’s not what we want our tax dollars going toward.”

The city is still reeling from weeks of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the Southland and the deployment of thousands of National Guard troops to respond to the protests that followed.

There have been sweeps targeting day laborers at local car washes and Home Depot parking lots.

“There’s too many things to protest right now,” said Hunter Dunn of the 50501 Movement, which organized the July 4 rally. Many immigrants, he said, are “afraid to go to work, afraid to go to school.”

Federal agents, often shielding their identities with face masks and sometimes driving unmarked cars, have been carrying out aggressive raids since early June, triggering widespread protests.

Trump sent more than 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to the L.A. area to protect federal buildings and workers during the unrest, which garnered pushback from state and local officials who complained that the military presence exacerbated the situation. Earlier this week, about 150 Guard members were released from the protest assignment.

The immigration enforcement actions in L.A. have heightened tensions between city and state leaders and the Trump administration. The public sparring has played out on social media and in court.

Angelenos march near Los Angeles City Hall on the Fourth of July in a demonstration against the ongoing ICE raids taking place in the city.

Mayor Karen Bass renewed her calls this week for Trump to end the ICE raids, saying in a post on X that his administration is “causing the fear and terror so many in L.A. are feeling.”

“They came for our neighbors in unmarked vans. Raided workplaces. Ripped apart families. Even U.S. citizens. This is not law enforcement — it’s political theater with human costs,” she wrote in another post.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is battling the Trump administration in court over the deployment of Guard troops without his consent. And this week, the Trump administration sued the city of L.A., Bass and City Council members, saying the city’s sanctuary law is illegal. The law generally prohibits city employees or city property to be used to investigate or detain anyone for the purpose of immigration enforcement.

On Wednesday, immigrants rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and Public Counsel sued the Trump administration in federal court seeking to block what the suit describes as the administration’s “ongoing pattern and practice of flouting the Constitution and federal law” during immigration raids in the L.A. area.

Immigrant advocates have warned that the tax and spending bill championed by United States President Donald Trump will send the administration’s controversial deportation campaign into overdrive.

The bill — called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” among its supporters — is slated to be signed into law on Friday, ushering in an influx of funds for Trump’s immigration crackdown.

That comes as experts say the Trump administration has already taken drastic measures to increase its immigration arrests and expulsions. Those arrests have cut deep into communities across the country, prompting protests and other forms of public outcry.

In a statement following the passage of the bill, Vanessa Cardenas, the executive director of the immigration reform group America’s Voice, took aim at White House adviser Stephen Miller.

He is widely seen as the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policies across his first and second administrations.

“His dreams are America’s nightmare,” Cardenas said. “His mass deportation crusade already is imperiling our industries, spreading fear in American communities, and ripping American families apart and would become all the worse if the big ugly bill becomes law.”

Here’s how the bill could be transformative.

Historic deportation funding

All told, the bill passed by the House and Senate earmarks about $170bn for immigration and border enforcement funding.

That, according to the American Immigration Council (AIC), represents the “largest investment in detention and deportation in US history”.

Of that money, $45bn will go to new immigration detention centres for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security that oversees immigration arrests and the detention of individuals already in the country.

That’s a whopping 265-percent increase from ICE’s fiscal year 2024 detention budget, at a time when advocates have continued to raise concerns about the conditions and oversight of immigration detention centres.

Those funds are projected to expand the capacity of the country’s detention centres from about 56,000 beds to more than 100,000, according to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute.

Much of that money is likely to go to private companies, the Brennan Center added. Private firms already oversee about 90 percent of detention centre capacity and will “reap major financial benefits” from the new bill, the analysis said.

“The plan to put hundreds of thousands more people in ICE detention facilities comes at a time when DHS is blocking oversight of those facilities,” Brennan Center analyst Lauren-Brook Eisen wrote.

“And there have been growing reports of unsanitary, harsh, and unsafe conditions. At least 10 people have died in immigration detention so far this year, a rate nearly three times the number of deaths over the past four years.”

The bill’s language has also sparked concerns that it could override legal restraints over how long immigration authorities can detain children, as established in the 1997 Flores settlement.

The American Civil Liberties Union has said the legislation is “opening the door to prolonged detention of children and families”.

Growing immigration ‘dragnet’

The legislation also allocates nearly $29.9bn for ICE’s deportation and enforcement operations, a threefold increase compared to the fiscal year 2024 budget, according to the American Immigration Council.

Immigrant advocates say the agency has already begun to employ increasingly severe tactics to surge its arrest numbers to fulfil Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportation.

In May, immigration officials reportedly set a daily arrest target of 3,000 per day, three times the previously reported goal.

But immigration agents averaged only about 778 arrests per day during Trump’s first months in office, according to government data from January 26 to May 3.

Speaking during a news conference in June, Cardenas warned that the pressure campaign was already creating a “situation on the ground where ICE is literally just trying to go after anybody that they can catch”.

That included raids on workplaces and locations like hardware store parking lots, where immigrants are known to gather for informal construction gigs. Undocumented individuals brought to the US as children, known as “Dreamers”, have also been caught up in the arrest sweeps.

Cardenas described the strategy as a “dragnet” that touched “long-established, deeply rooted Dreamers and other folks that have been in the United States for a long time”.

To increase their arrest numbers, immigration officials have instructed ICE agents to “get creative”, according to a June report from The Guardian newspaper. They encouraged agents to remain vigilant for undocumented individuals whom they may encounter by chance, referred to as “collaterals” in internal emails.

The Trump administration has also sought to expand its cooperation with local law enforcement. The Tennessee Highway Patrol and ICE, for example, collaborated on a series of traffic stops in May that local immigrant advocates decried as blatant racial profiling.

The new legislation includes $3.5bn to reimburse states for immigration enforcement and cooperation.

“We are becoming a police state,” said Gaby Pacheco, the president of TheDream.US, which helps undocumented students pursue higher education and careers.

During a June news conference, Pacheco warned of increased cooperation between local law enforcement and immigration officials.

“It’s difficult to see that those individuals in our community that we have always cherished, like police officers and campus safety, are now acting to the detriment of our communities and going after immigrants,” she said.

Rounding out the immigration funding in the bill is $46.6bn for border wall construction and $4.1bn to hire and train more border patrol agents.

Will the funding ‘make America safe’?

Trump has, for years, pushed the premise that mass deportations are the only way to repair a country beset by dangerous foreign criminals.

Studies, however, show that undocumented people commit crimes at lower rates than US-born citizens.

After Trump’s bill was passed by the House on Thursday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on social media that the legislation is “a win for law and order and the safety and security of the American people”.

She added it will “further deliver on President Trump’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN”.

But new data has continued to cast doubt on the administration’s claims.

On Thursday, The Washington Post published an analysis that found that, while the number of immigration arrests has risen in recent months, the proportion of those arrested with criminal convictions has fallen.

In January, about 46 percent of immigration detainees had been convicted of a crime, according to the report, which relied on statistics obtained by the Deportation Data Project and the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

By June, that proportion had dropped to 30 percent.

The report noted that the details of the charges, and their severity, were not available.

Meanwhile, 61 percent of the 93,818 people deported from the country since Trump took office had no criminal convictions, according to the Post. Entering the US without documentation is a civil, not criminal, offence.

Another data analysis, from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), offered similar findings.

Out of the 56,397 people held in immigration detention as of June 15, about 71 percent did not have criminal convictions, though 25 percent did have pending charges.

Hector Sanchez Barba, president of Mi Familia Vota, a Hispanic voters advocacy group, was among those decrying Trump’s bill as it passed in the House on Thursday.

In a statement, he pointed to the estimated $3.3 trillion the bill is expected to add to the national debt, as well as the cuts to the programmes for low-income individuals, like Medicaid, used to offset the spending.

“Our children and grandchildren will have to pay for its massive debt,” he said, “while obscene amounts of money will go to ICE policies that punish families and the essential workers our economy needs for their hard work and tax dollars.”

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has weighed in publicly for the first time since the passage of President Donald Trump’s signature piece of budget legislation, commonly known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill“.

On Friday, Musk took to his social media platform X to once again float the possibility of a third party to rival the two major ones — the Democrats and the Republicans — in United States politics.

“Independence Day is the perfect time to ask if you want independence from the two-party (some would say uniparty) system! Should we create the America Party?” Musk asked his followers, attaching an interactive poll.

Musk has maintained that both major parties have fallen out of step with what he describes as the “80 percent in the middle” – a number he estimates represents the moderates and independents who do not align with either end of the political spectrum.

His desire to form a new party, however, emerged after a public fallout with Trump over the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, a sweeping piece of legislation that passed both chambers of Congress on Thursday.

Yet again on Friday, Musk revisited his objections to the bill, albeit indirectly. He shared Senator Rand Paul’s critique that the bill “explodes the deficit in the near-term”, responding with a re-post and the “100” emoji, signifying his full agreement.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill” has long been a policy priority for Trump, even before he returned to office for a second term on January 20.

His aim was to pass a single piece of legislation that included several key pillars from his agenda, allowing him to proceed with his goals without having to seek multiple approvals from Congress.

But the “One Big Beautiful Bill” has been controversial among Democrats and even some Republicans. The bill would make permanent the 2017 tax cuts from Trump’s first term, which critics argue disproportionately benefit the wealthy over middle- to low-income workers.

It also raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion and is projected to add $3.3 trillion to the country’s deficit, according to a nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

Further funding is earmarked to bolster Trump’s campaign to crack down on immigration into the US. But to pay for the tax cuts and the spending, the bill includes cuts to critical social services, including Medicaid, a government health insurance programme for low-income households, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps.

Fiscal conservatives opposed the debt increase, while several other Republicans worried about how Medicaid restrictions would affect their constituents.

But in recent weeks, Trump and other Republican leaders rallied many of the holdouts, allowing the bill to pass both chambers of Congress by narrow margins.

Senator Paul of Kentucky was one of only three Republicans in the Senate to vote “no” on the bill. In the aftermath of its final passage on Thursday, he wrote on social media: “This is Washington’s MO: short-term politicking over long-term sustainability.”

Trump is slated to sign the bill into law in a White House ceremony on Friday.

The debate over the bill, however, proved to be a tipping point for Trump and Musk’s relationship. In late May, during his final days as a “special government adviser”, Musk appeared on the TV programme CBS Sunday Morning and said he was “disappointed” in the legislation, citing the proposed increase to the budget deficit.

“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk told a CBS journalist.

By May 30, his time in the Trump administration had come to an end, though the two men appeared to part on cordial terms.

But after leaving his government role, Musk escalated his attacks on the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, warning it would be disastrous for the US economy.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” Musk wrote on June 3.

Musk went so far as to suggest Trump should be impeached and that he had information about the president’s relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, though he did not offer evidence. Those posts have since been deleted.

Trump, meanwhile, accused Musk on social media of going “CRAZY” and seeking to lash out because the bill would peel back government incentives for the production of electric vehicles (EVs).

On June 5, Musk began to muse about launching his own political party. “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” he wrote.

In follow-up posts, he noted that his followers appeared to agree with him, and he endorsed a commenter’s suggestion for the party’s potential name.

“‘America Party’ has a nice ring to it. The party that actually represents America!” Musk said.

As the world’s richest man and the owner of companies like the carmaker Tesla and the rocket manufacturer SpaceX, Musk has billions of dollars at his disposal: The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his net worth at $361bn as of Friday.

But experts warn that third parties have historically struggled to compete in the US’s largely two-party system, and that they can even weaken movements they profess to back, by draining votes away from more viable candidates.

Musk’s estimate about the “80 percent in the middle” might also be an overstatement. Polls vary as to how many people identify as independent or centrists.

But in January, the research firm Gallup found that an average of 43 percent of American adults identified as independent, matching a record set in 2014. Gallup’s statistics also found a decline in the number of American adults saying they were “moderate”, with 34 percent embracing the label in 2024.

Still, on Friday, Musk shared his thoughts about how a potential third party could gain sway in the largely bifurcated US political sphere. He said he planned to take advantage of the weak majorities the major parties are able to obtain in Congress.

“One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts,” he wrote.

“Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.”

On July 3, the United States House of Representatives passed President Donald Trump’s signature tax cut and spending package, which he has called the “One Big Beautiful Bill“.

The bill combines tax reductions, spending hikes on defence and border security, and cuts to social safety nets.

Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned that the bill “hurts everyday Americans and rewards billionaires with massive tax breaks”.

Trump’s erstwhile ally, billionaire Elon Musk, publicly opposed the bill, arguing it would bloat expenditure and the country’s already unmatched debt.

Trump is expected to sign the bill into law on Friday, July 4 – the US’s independence day – at 4pm ET.

Here’s what’s next – and whom the bill will affect:

How have taxes been lowered?

The main goal of the bill was to extend Trump’s first-term tax cuts.

In 2017, Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered taxes and increased the standard deduction for all taxpayers, primarily benefitting higher-income earners.

More than a third of the total cuts went to households with an income of $460,000 or more.

The top 1 percent (roughly 2.4 million people) received average tax cuts of about $61,090 by 2025 – higher than any other income group. By contrast, the middle 60 percent of earners (78 million people) saw cuts in the range of $380 to $1,800.

Those tax breaks were set to expire this year, but the new bill has made them permanent. It also adds some more cuts Trump promised during his latest campaign.

For instance, there is a change to the US tax code called the State and Local Taxes deduction.

This will let taxpayers deduct certain local taxes (like property taxes) from their federal tax return.

Currently, people can only deduct up to $10,000 of these taxes. The new bill would raise that cap from $10,000 to $40,000 for five years.

Taxpayers will also be allowed to deduct income earned from tips and overtime, until 2028, as well as interest paid on loans for buying cars made in the US from this year until 2028.

Elsewhere, the estate tax exemption will rise to $15m for individuals and $30m for married couples.

In all, the legislation contains about $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

How big are social welfare cuts?

To help offset the cost of the tax cuts, Republicans plan to scale back Medicaid and food assistance programmes for low-income families.

Their stated goal was to focus these programmes on certain groups – primarily pregnant women, people with disabilities and children – while also reducing what they deem to be waste, including by limiting access to immigrants.

Currently, more than 71 million people depend on Medicaid, the government health insurance program.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the bill would leave an additional 17 million Americans without health cover in the next decade.

While Medicaid helps Americans suffering from poor health, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) helps poor people afford groceries.

About 40 million Americans currently receive benefits through SNAP, also known as food stamps.

The CBO calculates that 4.7 million SNAP participants will lose out over the 2025-2034 period, due to program reductions.

Changes to Medicaid and SNAP could become permanent provisions, with no sunset clauses attached to them.

A recent White House memo pointed to more than $1 trillion in welfare cuts from the new bill – the largest spending reductions to the US safety net in modern history.

Will there be new money for national security?

The bill sets aside about $350bn, to be spread out over several years, for Trump’s border and national security plans. This includes:

• $46bn for the US-Mexico border wall
• $45bn to fund 100,000 beds in migrant detention centres
• Billions more to hire an extra 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents by 2029, as part of Trump’s plan to carry out the largest mass deportation effort in US history.

Will clean energy be affected?

Republicans have rolled back tax incentives that support clean energy projects powered by renewables like solar and wind, instead giving tax breaks to coal and oil companies.

These “green” tax breaks were a part of former President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act, which aimed to tackle climate change and reduce healthcare costs.

A tax break for people who buy new or used electric vehicles will expire on September 30 this year, instead of at the end of 2032 under current law.

How will the bill affect the US debt profile?

The legislation would raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, from $36.2 trillion currently (which amounts to 122 percent of gross domestic product or GDP), going beyond the $4 trillion outlined in the version passed by the House in May.

Washington cannot borrow more than its stated debt ceiling. But since 1960, Congress has raised, suspended or changed the terms of the debt ceiling 78 times, facilitating more leverage and undermining the US’s long-term fiscal stability.

In his first term, Trump oversaw a roughly $8 trillion increase in the federal debt, which surged due to 2017 tax cuts and emergency spending, approved by Congress, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Debt as a share of GDP was already higher last year than it was anytime outside of World War II, the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic. Deficit concerns contributed to Moody’s downgrading of the US credit score in May.

For its part, the White House claims the new tax bill will reduce projected deficits by more than $1.4 trillion over the next decade, in part by spurring additional growth. But economists on both sides of the aisle have strongly disputed that.

Indeed, according to the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, interest payments on national debt will rise to $2 trillion per year by 2034 owing to the legislation, crowding out spending on other goods and services.

How did the House of Representatives vote on the bill?

The lower house of the US Congress voted by a margin of 218 to 214 in favour of the bill on Thursday.

All 212 Democratic members of the House opposed the bill. They were joined by Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who broke from the Republican majority.

On July 1, the Senate narrowly passed the bill by a 51–50 vote, with the deciding vote cast by Vice President JD Vance.

Who will benefit the most?

According to Yale University’s Budget Lab, wealthier taxpayers are likely to gain more from this bill than lower-income Americans.

They estimate that people in the lowest income bracket will see their incomes drop by 2.5 percent, mainly because of cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, while the highest earners will see their incomes rise by 2.2 percent.

Shorter enrollment periods. More paperwork. Higher premiums.

The sweeping tax and spending bill pushed by President Trump includes provisions that will not only reshape people’s experience with the Affordable Care Act, but also sharply undermine the gains in health insurance coverage associated with it, according to some policy analysts.

The moves affect consumers and have particular resonance for the 19 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that run their own ACA exchanges.

Many of those states fear that the additional red tape — especially requirements that would end automatic reenrollment — would have an outsize impact on their policyholders. That’s because a greater percentage of people in those states use those rollovers versus shopping around each year, something more commonly done by people in states that use the federal healthcare.gov marketplace.

“The federal marketplace always had a message of, ‘Come back in and shop,’ while the state-based markets, on average, have a message of, ‘Hey, here’s what you’re going to have next year, here’s what it will cost; if you like it, you don’t have to do anything,’” said Ellen Montz, who oversaw the federal ACA marketplace under the Biden administration as deputy administrator and director at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. She is now a managing director with the Manatt Health consulting group.

Millions — perhaps up to half of enrollees in some states — may lose or drop coverage as a result of that and other changes in the legislation combined with a new rule from the Trump administration and the likely expiration at year’s end of enhanced premium subsidies put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Without an extension of those subsidies, which have been an important driver of Obamacare enrollment in recent years, premiums are expected to rise 75% on average next year. That’s starting to happen already, based on some early state rate requests for next year, which are hitting double digits.

“We estimate a minimum 30% enrollment loss, and, in the worst-case scenario, a 50% loss,” said Devon Trolley, executive director of Pennie, the ACA marketplace in Pennsylvania, which had 496,661 enrollees this year, a record.

Drops of that magnitude nationally, coupled with the loss of Medicaid coverage for millions more people under the legislation Trump calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” could undo inroads made in the nation’s uninsured rate, which dropped by about half from the time most of the ACA’s provisions went into effect in 2014, when it hovered around 14% to 15% of the population, to just over 8%, according to the most recent data.

Premiums would rise along with the uninsured rate because older or sicker policyholders are more likely to try to jump enrollment hurdles, while those who rarely use coverage — and are thus less expensive — would not.

After a dramatic all-night session, House Republicans passed the bill Thursday, meeting the president’s Friday deadline. Trump is expected to sign the measure on Independence Day. It will increase the federal deficit by trillions of dollars and cut spending on a variety of programs, including Medicaid and nutrition assistance, to partly offset the cost of extending tax cuts put in place during the first Trump administration.

The administration and its supporters say the GOP-backed changes to the ACA are needed to combat fraud. Democrats and ACA supporters see this effort as the latest in a long history of Republican efforts to weaken or repeal Obamacare. Among other things, the legislation would end several changes put in place by the Biden administration that were credited with making it easier to sign up, such as lengthening the annual open enrollment period and launching a special program for very low-income people that essentially allows them to sign up year-round.

In addition, automatic reenrollment, used by more than 10 million people for 2025 ACA coverage, would end in the 2028 sign-up season. Instead, consumers would have to update their information, starting in August each year, before the close of open enrollment, which would end Dec. 15, a month earlier than currently.

That’s a key change to combat rising enrollment fraud, said Brian Blase, president of the conservative Paragon Health Institute, because it gets at what he calls the Biden era’s “lax verification requirements.”

He blames automatic reenrollment, coupled with the availability of zero-premium plans for people with lower incomes that qualify them for large subsidies, for a sharp uptick in complaints from insurers, consumers and brokers about fraudulent enrollments in 2023 and 2024. Those complaints centered on consumers being enrolled in an ACA plan, or switched from one to another, without authorization, often by commission-seeking brokers.

In testimony to Congress on June 25, Blase wrote that “this simple step will close a massive loophole and significantly reduce improper enrollment and spending.”

States that run their own marketplaces, however, saw few, if any, such problems, which were confined mainly to the 31 states using the federal healthcare.gov.

The state-run marketplaces credit their additional security measures and tighter control over broker access than healthcare.gov for the relative lack of problems.

“If you look at California and the other states that have expanded their Medicaid programs, you don’t see that kind of fraud problem,” said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, the state’s Obamacare marketplace. “I don’t have a single case of a consumer calling Covered California saying, ‘I was enrolled without consent.’”

Such rollovers are common with other forms of health insurance, such as job-based coverage.

“By requiring everyone to come back in and provide additional information, and the fact that they can’t get a tax credit until they take this step, it is essentially making marketplace coverage the most difficult coverage to enroll in,” said Trolley at Pennie, 65% of whose policyholders were automatically reenrolled this year, according to KFF data.

Federal data show about 22% of federal sign-ups in 2024 were automatic reenrollments, versus 58% in state-based plans. Besides Pennsylvania, the states that saw such sign-ups for more than 60% of enrollees include California, New York, Georgia, New Jersey and Virginia, according to KFF.

States do check income and other eligibility information for all enrollees — including those being automatically renewed, those signing up for the first time, and those enrolling outside the normal open enrollment period because they’ve experienced a loss of coverage or other life event or meet the rules for the low-income enrollment period.

“We have access to many data sources on the back end that we ping, to make sure nothing has changed,” Altman said. “Most people sail through and are able to stay covered without taking any proactive step.”

If flagged for mismatched data, applicants are asked for additional information. Under current law, “we have 90 days for them to have a tax credit while they submit paperwork,” Altman said.

That would change under the tax and spending plan before Congress, ending presumptive eligibility while a person submits the information.

A white paper written for Capital Policy Analytics, a Washington-based consultancy that specializes in economic analysis, concluded there appears to be little upside to the changes.

While “tighter verification can curb improper enrollments,” the additional paperwork, along with the expiration of higher premiums from the enhanced tax subsidies, “would push four to six million eligible people out of Marketplace plans, trading limited fraud savings for a surge in uninsurance,” wrote free market economists Ike Brannon and Anthony LoSasso.

“Insurers would be left with a smaller, sicker risk pool and heightened pricing uncertainty, making further premium increases and selective market exits [by insurers] likely,” they wrote.

Appleby writes for KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.