The debate over the budget reconciliation bill, which many people call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, requires many policy changes that will affect public safety and will expose many people to financial ruin and medical uncertainty. This bill also seriously underminds safety in America. Many people have focused their conversations around budget reconciliation. They have focused on issues like taxes and entitlement spending, don’t they realize the Republican sponsored “megbill” will also seriously undermine safety across the United States of America.

Usually legislators need 60 votes to prevent a fillibuster in the Senate, but when Congress wants to enact major laws however, Budget reconciliation lets them bypass this process and pass a budget bill with a simple majority of 51 votes. With some strict exceptions, such as Social Security, all provisions in the bill must nominally relate to spending and revenue, as determined by the Senate parliamentarian. However, with congressional gridlock continuing to worsen, legislators have increasingly used reconciliation to pass a broader array of policies, such as the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Congress’s latest effort comes in at more than 1,000 pages. The House passed its deeply unpopular version on May 22, with three Republicans crossing the aisle to join the entire Democratic caucus in voting against the bill. Now, as the Senate finalizes its own version and the two sides move toward hammering out a compromise by President Trump’s July 4 deadline, here are the public safety issues to watch:

1. Dangerous cuts to the safety net

Evidence shows that meeting people’s needs makes communities safer, yet the House reconciliation bill could cause an estimated 10.3 million people to lose Medicaid benefits—and Senate Republicans have been pushing for even deeper cuts. GOP lawmakers are also planning major cuts for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a critical food assistance program that helped feed more than 41 million Americans in 2024. The House bill would cut SNAP benefits for an estimated 1.3 million people in an average month, and after initially rejecting the cuts, the Senate parliamentarian privately signaled support for a tweaked version.

These cuts would cause massive destabilization, especially in communities experiencing poverty—making people less safe. Research has shown timeandagain that Medicaid expansion is linked to drops in crime. States that expanded Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act rollout saw violent crime decrease by more than five percent. Other studies have found the impact of Medicaid expansion on crime to be even greater. Medicaid expansions have also been found to reduce the number of times a person released from prison is reincarcerated within a year by more than 11 percent. On the other hand, when people lose health care coverage offered through Medicaid, crime rates climb.

Similarly, there is extensive evidence that wider access to SNAP benefits reduces crime, with studies showing that lifted SNAP restrictions lead to lower rearrest rates and reduced intimate partner violence, among other safety-related benefits. If we are serious about improving public safety, research suggests that we should be investing in health care and social supports, not slashing programs that make people more safe. 

2. Harmful work requirements for public benefits

The House reconciliation bill expands work requirements for people to be eligible for Medicaid and SNAP. The Senate bill would make these requirements even more damaging by widening their scope to include parents and caretakers of children over 14. Republican leadership argues that requiring people to work 80 hours a month in order to be eligible for these benefits will ensure the country’s safety net helps “the truly needy.” However, research shows that these harmful restrictions will only make it lesslikely that people who need these programs most will benefit from them.

This policy would particularly hurt the estimated 450,000 people released from state and federal prisons every year. People leaving prison face immense barriers to finding employment, from lack of access to education behind bars to discrimination based on their conviction history, which is still legal in many states. A 2021 report showed that a third of people could not find employment within four years of leaving federal prison. This is one reason that formerly incarcerated people are 10 times more likely to experience homelessness than the general public.

If we want to address people’s needs and prevent crime, we should make sure that people who have completed their sentences are met with opportunities, not further punishment and barriers to success. This could include lifting conviction-related restrictions on public benefits, restoring grants for reentry services that have been cut, passing the bipartisan Clean Slate Act to seal some conviction records, automatically enrolling people leaving prison in benefits like health care, and providing cash benefits to help people build stable lives after prison (as in a California pilot program that successfully reduced recidivism). Returning home after prison is hard enough, and the stability of our communities depends on making it easier—not harder.

3. Drastic increases in spending on immigration detention and cuts to immigrant services

The United States immigration detention system is an inhumane affront to due process. Despite extensive documentation of overcrowding, medical neglect, starvation, forced labor, forced sterilization, family separation, and other horrors, both the House and Senate reconciliation bills would provide more than $100 billion to expand prison-like immigration detention facilities and provide expanded funding for dangerously militarized immigration enforcement—ballooning the already massive Department of Homeland Security budget, diverting funds away from critical programs that make us safe and destabilizing communities in the process.

This expansion—indeed, immigration detention as a whole—is entirely unnecessary. The federal government’s own data shows that detention does not deter migration, and detention is not necessary to ensure that people appear in court for immigration hearings. And with the erosion of due process and cuts to critical federal legal services—including the Legal Orientation Program, the Legal Orientation Program for Custodians of Unaccompanied Children, and National Qualified Representation Program—many people may be denied even the most basic access to legal counsel.

The House reconciliation bill would also add eligibility restrictions to immigrant families seeking health care, child tax credits, and food aid while instituting massive new immigration fees, including a $1,000 fee for people attempting to claim asylum. People seeking asylum, safety, and stability in the United States—those fleeing war or persecution and attempting to remain with their families—are among the least likely to be able to afford hefty fees.

All these anti-immigrant policies and investments will only serve to make the country less safe for people navigating the immigration system.

4. Limitations on the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI)

The House reconciliation bill would place a 10-year moratorium on regulation of AI, unless connected to criminal penalties. This provision has seen sharp resistance even from Republicans. The bill encourages governments at the state and local levels to promote AI use, but it would bar them from limiting or preventing harmful AI deployment through administrative policies. This provision would block states from enforcing essential civil protections, effectively creating a vacuum for unchecked AI use unless states criminalize violations. The Senate has cleared this dangerous provision for passage by weaponizing federal funding for high-speed internet access, proposing to withhold these funds from states that regulate AI.

By prioritizing technological adoption over constitutional protections, the reconciliation bill welcomes the expansion of novel, untested AI technologies that have the potential to cause harm without appropriate governance, transparency, oversight, and accountability. A 2019 review of the use of facial recognition technology in policing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found significant rates of misidentification, especially for Asian, Black, and Indigenous groups. Misidentification can lead to wrongful arrests and harm for those impacted. In 2020, Washington State passed the most comprehensive policy requiring law enforcement to perform ongoing accountability reports, security protocols, testing and training, and data management, solely for its use of facial recognition. This rigorous oversight is essential for AI technologies that rely on complex algorithms and large language models, which can produce biased outputs and perpetuate discriminatory errors. If this bill passes, these administrative protections could be wiped out, putting people at risk.

5. Destructive changes to Pell Grant eligibility

Pell Grants provide access to life-changing education for millions of students who can’t afford college tuition, including students behind bars. The House reconciliation bill would make it more difficult for students to qualify for this financial aid—particularly those who are incarcerated. By eliminating Pell eligibility for students taking less than half a full load of credits and changing full-time enrollment grant eligibility from 12 to 15 credits, the House bill would harm incarcerated students, who often simply can’t take more classes because of logistical obstacles to participation, like the number of available classrooms. The Senate’s proposal, which does not add major exclusions to Pell, is more supportive of college students in prison and will hopefully prevail in the debate.

The benefits of college in prison extend far beyond the walls of the classroom. In addition to creating safer environments for people behind bars, college programs help ensure that people in prison can secure well-paying jobs when they return home and decrease the odds that they will return to prison. Vera estimates that at least 760,000 people in prison are eligible to receive Pell Grants to fund their college education. With more than 450,000 people leaving state or federal prison every year, ensuring access to college in prison can significantly benefit not only incarcerated people but also their families and communities. Education is one of the strongest tools to break the cycle of incarceration. The federal government should be expanding access to education in prison, not limiting it.

The bottom line

The Trump administration has already done immense harm to the nation’s public safety infrastructure. It’s not too late for lawmakers to reject this bill—or, at very least, alter or counteract these dangerous provisions—before the government does even greater harm.

https://www.vera.org/news/5-ways-trumps-big-beautiful-bill-will-undermine-public-safety