Help Block the Big Bad Bill!
We need to tap all our networks to stop the passing of this budget bill. This bill is bad for everyone, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or neither—but Republicans especially are being shielded from the information they need to be able to advocate for their best interests. If you know anyone in the following districts, even if they’re not broadly sympathetic to our cause and even if they voted for Trump, please reach out to them and explain how bad this really is. We have provided specialized call scripts for each of these representatives:
You know your people best, but here are some things in this bill that are bad even from a right-leaning political stance:
This bill will increase the federal deficit.
The Senate added a provision to raise the debt limit by 5 trillion.
If services are being cut, why aren’t savings going toward fixing the deficit?
Increased ICE activity will have a negative impact on the agriculture industry.
Family farms, who employ large numbers of immigrants, will suffer if ICE is empowered to continue its attacks on immigrants; they’re not discriminating between folks who came here legally or illegally. How will farms survive if their workers are too scared to come to work?
Medicaid cuts will increase burden of care on states—it’s more costly to provide emergency services for people who can’t access primary care than to provide primary care, and without Medicaid picking up that cost, it’ll fall on states.
How will states make up the funds to pay for this care that they’re obligated to provide? My bet would be by increasing taxes.
This bill increases funding to the military (even beyond what they requested) and ICE without any measures to avoid or ameliorate waste, fraud, or abuse.
This just increases the compensation paid out to government defense contractors, without any increased oversight or proof that they’re using the money responsibly.
Why does Alaska get a special carveout exemption from the cut to nutritional benefits because they have a higher rate of payment errors?
This just encourages waste, fraud, and abuse.
This bill slashes nearly 70% of funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Consumers have very little structural support in the US when a company rips them off; the CFPB is one of the few tools consumers can use to get a business to do the right thing.
Pulls the rug out from under business that were relying on clean energy tax credits
These companies have already invested in clean energy, because the government said that they would get tax credits for this work. It’s not fair to these companies to change the rules of the game partway through.
We don’t need you to convince MA representatives to vote no on the bill—we just need you to convince the people you know to call their reps and tell them they don’t like this bill. We’re already making all the arguments we need to, and if these people in Congress were going to be swayed by logic, they’d be on our side already; now we need to drive up the tally numbers of constituents who are mad about this, so representatives are a little more hesitant to vote yes on this bill and risk losing votes for their next reelection campaign.