Shelley Feist, 61, of Washington, D.C., who grew up in North Dakota, protests outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, July 2, 2025, as House Republicans try to pass a “big, beautiful bill.” Feist said she worries about the effects of Medicaid cuts on rural hospitals because her 80-year-old parents depend on rural health care in Minot, North Dakota. (Photo: Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Protesters demonstrated against a “big, beautiful bill” outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday as Republicans in the House of Representatives overtook votes to get the bill across the finish line and to President Donald Trump’s desk by his self-imposed July 4 deadline.
Shelley Feist stood on Independence Avenue, near the entrance to the House of Representatives, holding signs above her head, one of which read “Cruel Corrupt Cowards” and the other of a Republican elephant with the word “Treason” written on it.
“I think they’re cruel. I think cruelty is what it’s all about,” Feist, 61, of Washington, D.C., and North Dakota native, told States Newsroom. “It is also extremely disturbing that there is such cowardice in the GOP.”
Huge budget reconciliation package, passed by Senate Republicans on Tuesday with Vice President J.D. Vance’s tie-breaking vote extends and expands the 2017 tax cuts at a cost of about $4.5 trillion over the next decade. It also draws funding from federal food and health safety net programs.
The bill dramatically eliminates immaculate energy tax credits and raises the nation’s debt limit to $5 trillion.
Latest figurines from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office show that the package will boost the nation’s deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next decade as the country remains mired in record debt. This office is earlier analysis The bill passed by the House stated that the package would limit resources for low-income families while eliminating higher-income people.
Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who chaired an hour-long final committee hearing on the bill overnight, said Wednesday that the package is “the embodiment of America First and we would do well to remember that.”
Medicare cuts
Most vital to Feist are cuts to Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income people and some people with disabilities. The Senate version of the package, adopted on Tuesday, included, among others: $1 trillion in cuts To Medicaid for 10 years, according to the CBO.
“I have parents in North Dakota who are 85 and 86. They already have a hard time seeing a doctor. Each doctor who leaves takes on 14 times the burden. Health care in rural areas is already extremely difficult. I would expect that if this bill becomes law, there will be no hospital near where my parents live,” said Feist, whose parents live near Minot.
Rural hospitals rely on Medicaid payments. In last minute move ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Senate Republicans doubled the fund to $50 billion to subsidize hospitals that will lose funding. Critics say this amount is not enough to fill the gap.
Sense. GOP Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina voted “no” after expressing concerns about Medicaid cuts.
Nadine Seiler, 60, of Waldorf, Maryland, protested against the bill near a news conference hosted by the Congressional Latino Conference. Seiler held a immense, spray-painted sheet above her head with messages on both sides: “Free America from Big Bad Bill” and “Soon Freedom in Name Only.”
“I worry about my fellow citizens who will lose Medicaid, food stamps and health care. People will die,” Seiler said.
“And I know Joni Ernst says we’re all going to die, but we’re going to die faster and unnecessarily, and I don’t care.”
Seiler meant Senator Ernst’s response to his Iowa constituents who expressed concern about Medicaid cuts at a town hall on May 30.
SNAP and ICE
Mark Starr sang a protest song he wrote about the “big, beautiful bill” while playing guitar and harmonica outside the Longworth House office building.
The 39-year-old Albuquerque, New Mexico resident told States Newsroom that he traveled to D.C. in overdue April to protest against the bill. He said he was particularly focused on the additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement fund included in the package, as well as cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food benefits to low-income households.
“New Mexico is pretty poor, so if these SNAP cuts go through, New Mexico kids are going to be hungry,” Starr said. “It’s just going to really devastate us, and we’re just one of many states that will be impacted.”
New Mexico has one of the highest poverty rates in the country.
A provision in the bill would shift the cost of food assistance to state governments for the first time in the history of the federal program. Critics fear states may tighten eligibility requirements or abandon the program because of the financial burden.
Left Center for Budget and Political Priorities estimates 55,000 teenagers 14 and older and adults 64 and under could lose food assistance in New Mexico due to cuts to the state’s work exemption law. Children would still be eligible, but overall, households would see significantly reduced SNAP funds.
CBO found in overdue May that the House-passed bill would result in the loss of food assistance to more than 3 million people across the country.
Starr said he also opposes providing additional funding for immigration enforcement.
“I think they’ve had enough,” he said, pointing to Trump’s visit to the US recent arrest in Florida, which the White House touts as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
The version approved by the Senate includes an additional $45 billion for ICE detention centers and $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement and deportations, among another billion for the southern border.
Pure energy to take a punch
Tiernan Sittenfeld of the League of Environmental Conservation Voters gathered just outside the House with a group wearing T-shirts that read, “Hands off our air, land and clean energy.”
Sittenfeld, the organization’s senior vice president of government affairs, argues that phasing out immaculate energy tax credits in the Senate version will “kill clean energy jobs.”
“It’s bad for our economy. It’s bad for jobs. It will raise energy bills. And of course it’s bad for the planet,” she said.
Senate Republicans accelerated the phaseout of certain housing, manufacturing and manufacturing loans at a faster pace than required by the House bill. The last-minute change, however, loosened the schedule for some technology-neutral energy credits and removed a previously added tax on wind and solar projects.
Industry groups and energy companies, compact and immense they warned early termination of loans will have a stern impact on economic growth.
Tax breaks for solar, wind, battery energy storage and electric vehicles, among others, were introduced under Democrats’ own 2022 budget reconciliation bill, known as the “Cutting Inflation Act.”
According to data collected since 2022 by Clean Investment Monitor, the joint institution for design by the Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
“Every Republican who votes for this legislation is voting against the interests of their constituents, they are voting to kill jobs in their district, they are voting to kill clean energy projects, they are voting to increase their constituents’ energy bills,” Sittenfeld said.
Members of the far-right House of Representatives, who abstained from voting Wednesday afternoon, are maintaining the rollback of immaculate energy tax cuts they have called “green recent scam”, don’t go far enough.
