The money moves up.
The suffering moves down.
The Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers on the 2025 budget law. Over 2026 through 2034, the poorest tenth of American households lose about 3.1 percent of their resources, roughly $1,200 a year each, mostly from cuts to Medicaid and food aid. The richest tenth gain about 2.7 percent, roughly $13,600 a year each, mostly from lower taxes. The Medicaid provisions alone leave 7.5 million more people without insurance in 2034.
Democrats just won Congress. The Associated Press called the Senate for them on election night and the House the next morning. People will celebrate. They should read the calendar first.
The bill comes due after the votes are counted, and the party standing in front of it will be the one voters just elected.
None of this came from nowhere.
Project 2025 told Congress to let states put work rules on able-bodied Medicaid recipients and to tighten the work rules for SNAP. The budget law went further than the blueprint and made both mandatory.
The Office of Personnel Management also published a final rule on Feb. 5, 2026, that strips normal removal protections from federal employees in policy roles. Positions move into it by presidential executive order. The Associated Press reported in 2025 that the idea came from the same blueprint, which sought to remove as many as 50,000 federal workers and replace them with loyalists. OPM says whistleblower and anti-discrimination protections stay.
California feels it first.
On Jan. 1, 2027, Medi-Cal starts requiring expansion adults to prove 80 hours of work or approved activity every month. The state’s Department of Health Care Services estimates 1.1 million people will lose coverage by 2029-30, many over paperwork and not eligibility. The Legislative Analyst’s Office says 1 million to 2 million could be disenrolled.
Arkansas tried the same rule in 2018. About 18,000 adults left Medicaid that year, and a Harvard study in the New England Journal of Medicine found no change in employment. Thousands lost coverage. Nobody got a job. California does it anyway because the federal law gives the state no choice.
Picture one enrollee. She is invented. She is built from how the rule works, and she is not rare.
She works a low-wage job with unsteady hours, 90 one month and 60 the next. The rule asks her to prove 80 every month and to renew every six months instead of every year.
A notice goes to an old address. A form comes back a week late. Nobody decides she is ineligible. The paperwork decides. The system decides.
The state calls these losses procedural. She keeps working. She loses her doctor.
Food is next.
About 840,000 CalFresh recipients now fall under the expanded work rule without an exemption, and the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates 660,000 of them will not meet it and are at risk of losing benefits.
Since Oct. 1, Washington pays 25 percent of administrative costs instead of 50. That adds $480 million a year to the state’s costs and $190 million to the counties’.
Next October, California starts paying a share of the benefits too. Its error rate was nearly 11 percent in 2023-24, which at the maximum share costs about $2 billion a year. The analyst says the state cannot replace what Washington takes without new revenue or cuts somewhere else.
Health insurance already took its hit.
The enhanced federal subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Covered California ended open enrollment at 1,927,371 members, but new signups fell 32 percent.
Among middle-income renewing members who lost all of their enhanced credits, 22 percent canceled, double last year’s rate. The state put in $190 million of its own to soften it. It helped. It did not replace what Washington took.
Start with who voted for this.
The Senate passed the law 51 to 50, with the vice president breaking the tie. The House cleared it 218 to 214. No Democrat voted yes. The only two House Republicans who voted no were Brian Fitzpatrick and Thomas Massie.
The blame belongs where the votes were. That does not let the winners off.
A party that campaigned on protecting people owns what it does with the power it just won. Spending bills start in the House, and the government runs on them.
A Democratic majority can attach the subsidies, the food aid and the coverage to those bills and force Republicans and the president to vote against keeping people fed and insured. It can subpoena the agencies writing the rules.
It can hold hearings in the counties that stand to lose the most, with people who lost coverage in the witness chair. A veto stops a repeal. It does not stop a record.
Democrats also run the state that carries out the Medi-Cal rule, so they have a hand in how hard the paperwork is.
The party’s habit is to arrive at a disaster as the manager. It asks for patience. It issues statements. It tells the base the votes aren’t there.
Hearings feed nobody unless someone has to answer for what they show.
California has no federal veto to fear when it raises its own money, and the state just tried.
Proposition 40 would have taxed billionaires once, at 5 percent, with backers estimating $100 billion for health care and food aid.
In the Associated Press count with 72 percent of votes in, it trailed 53.7 percent to 46.3 percent, or 5,274,431 to 4,541,175. Earlier counts had a competing measure that bans new state wealth taxes in the lead.
Billionaires and business interests spent $316.7 million against Prop. 40 and for the measures built to cancel it. Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed it and said the wealthy would leave.
The lesson is plain. The people who profit most from the federal law will spend to keep the state from touching them, and they spent more on one ballot than most Californians will see in their lives.
The union behind the measure says it will try again in 2028. It should, and the rest of the left should show up for it.
Voters will not read effective dates. They will open a letter. It will say their coverage ended or their food benefit shrank, and the name on the Congress that month will be a Democrat’s.
The worker who loses Medi-Cal over a late form does not care who wrote the law. She cares that she is sick and the clinic will not see her.
The mother whose CalFresh benefit shrinks does not care either. She cares what is in the cabinet on the twentieth of the month.
The richest tenth got their raise first. The poorest tenth get their notice later.
That is the order the people who wrote this law chose, and the cost landed on the people least able to pay it.
A system that lets a sick woman lose her doctor over a missing piece of paper is a choice. So is the money that paid for it.
Care as a right is the other choice, and that choice is Medicare for All.
Before January, ask every official you just elected, in writing, which of these dates they will fight and which votes they will force.
Keep the answers. Put them next to the names of the people who wrote the cuts and voted for them, and the people who got the money.
Then make the winners walk into that line and stay there until it moves.
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