One year after the Big Beautiful Bill, where are your promises, Mr. Trump

Introduction: a letter to mark an uncomfortable anniversary

Mr. President, exactly one year ago

Mr. Trump, exactly one year ago, on July 4, 2025, you signed your One Big Beautiful Bill Act to applause, that massive bill running more than a thousand pages that you presented as the backbone of your domestic agenda. According to Forbes, this law passed after a narrow 51-to-50 vote in the Senate, where Vice President JD Vance had to break the tie, then by 218 to 214 in the House of Representatives, despite unanimous Democratic opposition in both chambers.

One year later, to the day by this letter's calendar, it seems fair to ask you to account for what this law actually delivered to Americans, compared with what it promised on paper at your triumphant signing ceremony at the White House.

The spectacular debt ceiling increase

Five trillion dollars in additional headroom

Mr. President, your law raised the American debt ceiling by $5 trillion, according to Forbes and multiple independent budget analyses. That figure alone dwarfs most historical increases to the American debt ceiling, and it deserves to be stated plainly so every citizen grasps its true scale.

This massive increase was not a simple technical administrative adjustment: it reflected an implicit admission, within your own administration, that the spending and tax cuts contained in this law would require considerable federal borrowing in the years ahead.

A precedent that dwarfs previous historical increases

Previous increases to the American debt ceiling, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, were typically measured in hundreds of billions of dollars rather than trillions. The $5 trillion figure in your law therefore represents a significant break in scale from the American Congress's previous budget practices.

This break in scale deserves to be highlighted not to artificially dramatize the situation, but because it reflects a real structural shift in how Washington now approaches managing its long-term public debt.

The figure the Congressional Budget Office keeps revising upward

From 2.4 to more than 4 trillion depending on the calculation method

According to the Congressional Budget Office, your law is expected to increase the American primary deficit by $2.8 trillion by 2034, a figure already considerable on its own. But according to broader analyses that factor in additional debt service, including the CBO's own analysis published in February 2026, the cumulative impact climbs to $4.1 trillion, or even as high as $5 trillion if the law's temporary provisions become permanent, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

These successive upward revisions, Mr. President, are not the product of a media conspiracy against your administration. They come from Congress's own nonpartisan budget bodies, whose job is precisely to objectively assess the real fiscal impact of laws that have been passed.

Public debt as a share of GDP is soaring

One hundred twenty-four percent of GDP by 2034

The CBO estimates your law will push federal debt held by the public to roughly 124% of GDP by 2034, compared with a baseline projection of 117% before your bill passed. Other analyses, like the American Action Forum's, put this ratio even higher, at 127%, or even 129% if the temporary provisions become permanent.

These figures, Mr. President, are not mere statistical abstractions reserved for economists. They directly determine the federal government's future capacity to fund social programs, national defense, and infrastructure, without excessive dependence on international bond markets.

Tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthiest

A net income increase concentrated at the top

According to analyses from RBC and the CBO, the net effect of your law for the highest income decile translates into a roughly 2.7% increase in household income, while resources for the poorest decile would fall by about 4% by 2033, mainly because of cuts to the SNAP food assistance program and to Medicaid.

Your law cuts roughly $187 billion from SNAP funding over a decade, according to RBC, a reduction that will directly affect millions of low-income Americans, even as tax provisions benefiting the wealthiest taxpayers, such as raising the SALT deduction cap to $40,000, were largely preserved.

The SALT cap, a measure that mostly benefits high-income states

Raising the SALT deduction cap to $40,000, then to $40,400 in 2026, disproportionately benefits taxpayers living in states with high local taxes, often wealthier states, according to King & Spalding. This measure phases out gradually for taxpayers whose adjusted gross income exceeds $500,000, but it remains highly advantageous for a broad swath of high-income households.

This provision illustrates, once again, the tension between your campaign's populist rhetoric and certain concrete tax choices in the law, which favor segments of the population considerably wealthier than the middle class you claimed to prioritize.

Nearly eleven million Americans at risk of losing health coverage

A Medicaid overhaul with direct human consequences

According to Wikipedia and consistent legal analyses, the CBO estimates your law will cause roughly 10.9 million Americans to lose health coverage, mainly because of new work requirements imposed on Medicaid recipients and stricter eligibility checks. Your law also cuts Medicaid funding by nearly 12%, a figure confirmed by several law firms that analyzed the text in detail.

A $50 billion relief fund for rural hospitals was included in the law to partly cushion these effects, according to King & Spalding, but several health policy experts believe that amount remains far short of what is needed to offset the scale of coverage losses projected nationwide.

The promises kept that deserve to be acknowledged

No tax on tips or overtime

It would be dishonest of me, Mr. President, not to acknowledge that some of your campaign promises were indeed delivered in this law. Eliminating the federal tax on tips up to $25,000 and on overtime up to $12,500 for single filers, according to the Internal Revenue Service, represents direct, tangible tax relief for the workers who actually benefit from it.

Likewise, the child tax credit was raised from $2,000 to $2,200 per eligible child, with a permanent inflation adjustment starting in 2026, according to the IRS. These targeted measures directly answer commitments you made to American voters.

Child savings accounts, an interesting but limited idea

Your law also creates Trump accounts, savings accounts for American children, which cannot be funded until July 4, 2026, according to the IRS. This measure, while symbolically interesting, is still too new to be seriously evaluated for its real impact on American families.

Other provisions, such as the refundable adoption tax credit of up to $5,000, according to the IRS, represent targeted gains for specific families, without changing the overall budget trajectory this bill imposes on the country as a whole.

The promised economic growth remains to be fully proven

Optimistic projections that diverge depending on the source

The White House itself, in an economic report published in April 2026, claims your law will add between 3 and 12 basis points of real annual economic growth, an effect the CBO judges far more modest, estimating the impact at roughly 0.9 percentage points of additional GDP for 2026 alone, according to RBC.

This considerable gap between your own administration's projections and those of nonpartisan bodies like the CBO illustrates a recurring tension in evaluating your economic reforms: your agencies consistently favor the most favorable scenarios, while independent analysts remain considerably more cautious.

Interest rates climbing despite promises of a decrease

An inflationary effect you had not publicly anticipated

According to the CBO, your law is expected to push interest rates higher, which would in turn increase interest payments on the federal debt by nearly $441 billion compared with baseline projections. This mechanism, in which massive federal borrowing competes with private borrowers in bond markets, directly contradicts your stated goal of quickly lowering interest rates to support the American economy.

This dynamic illustrates an internal contradiction in your overall economic strategy: on one hand, you exert constant public pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut rates, while on the other, your own budget law structurally helps keep those same rates higher than they would otherwise be.

The impact on international bond markets

International bond investors are watching America's fiscal trajectory very closely, according to several financial analyses published by Forbes. A continued deterioration of American public finances could, over time, require higher yields on US Treasury bonds to keep attracting the foreign capital needed to finance this growing debt.

This dynamic, if it holds in the coming years, could eventually weigh on the entire American economy, from mortgage rates to corporate borrowing costs, far beyond abstract federal budget considerations alone.

An annual deficit already topping one point eight trillion

The concrete weight of 2025 and 2026

According to the CBO, the American federal deficit reached $1.8 trillion in 2025, or 5.8% of GDP, and is expected to hit $1.9 trillion in 2026. These figures, already considerable even before all of your law's provisions are fully in effect, point to a particularly heavy fiscal trajectory for the years ahead.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates your law alone will add $500 billion to the deficit in 2026 and $635 billion in 2027, before that annual impact gradually declines toward the end of the decade, as certain temporary provisions expire.

What this law reveals about your real priorities

Between campaign rhetoric and government arithmetic

Mr. President, your campaign promised tighter budget management than your predecessors. One year after this law's signing, the figures produced by nonpartisan institutions like the CBO tell a different story: one of a net, substantial increase in the deficit and public debt, only partially and insufficiently offset by economic growth whose real scale remains contested.

This gap between campaign rhetoric and fiscal reality is not unique to your administration alone; it runs through recent American fiscal policy history. But the scale of the numbers at stake here, with trillions of dollars in additional projected deficits, deserves particularly rigorous public scrutiny.

What Congress could still fix

Annual appropriations as the next battle

According to the National League of Cities, Congress must now pass twelve annual appropriations bills before the start of the next fiscal year, a deadline that offers another opportunity to adjust some of the most problematic budget trajectories set by your law. This upcoming legislative step will determine whether cuts to local federal programs, particularly for municipal governments, are applied rigorously or eased.

Members of Congress, whether Republican or Democrat, still have legislative levers to fix some of the budget excesses identified by the CBO, provided the political will exists to face the difficult choices that correction would inevitably require.

The midterm elections as a possible turning point

The upcoming midterm elections could be a key moment in determining whether American voters want to reward or punish the budget choices contained in this law. Public opinion polls on how this legislation is perceived remain split, with some voters welcoming the direct tax relief while others worry about the scale of the accumulated debt.

Whatever the electoral outcome, this law's fiscal consequences will continue unfolding over several years, regardless of the political makeup of Congress that emerges from the ballot box.

A precedent that goes beyond your presidency alone

America's long-term fiscal trajectory

Beyond your specific administration, Mr. President, this law fits into a broader and troubling American fiscal trajectory, where annual deficits systematically exceed a trillion dollars, regardless of which party holds power in Washington. The CBO projects cumulative deficits of $24.4 trillion over the next decade, according to an analysis published in February 2026.

This structural dynamic raises a question that goes well beyond your term alone: how much longer will international financial markets keep financing this American fiscal trajectory without demanding significantly higher interest rates to compensate for the perceived risk.

The burden future generations will carry

A debt that never disappears, it gets passed on

Mr. President, a simple arithmetic truth deserves repeating: every additional dollar of deficit your law creates today will, one day, have to be repaid or refinanced by future generations of Americans. The $24.4 trillion in cumulative deficits projected by the CBO over the next decade are not an accounting abstraction reserved for economists in Washington: they are concrete financial obligations that children born today will have to honor through their own future taxes.

This intergenerational reality should, in my view, transcend the usual partisan lines in Washington. No American political party can sincerely claim to defend the interests of younger generations while piling up, term after term, deficits in the trillions of dollars with no credible long-term repayment plan.

Conclusion: a letter demanding transparency, not controversy

What I am asking of you, one year later

Mr. President, this letter is not meant to deny the beneficial targeted measures contained in your law, nor to minimize your achievements on other fronts, particularly your firmness toward the West's geopolitical adversaries. It simply aims to ask you, in the name of the most basic democratic transparency, to publicly acknowledge the real scale of this law's fiscal cost, as documented by the CBO and other nonpartisan institutions.

Americans deserve an honest debate about the budget trade-offs this law imposes, rather than a one-sided celebration of its benefits alone, one year after it was signed under the White House spotlight.

An invitation to dialogue, not confrontation

I invite you, Mr. President, to organize a genuine public accounting of this law, with the participation of economists from across the political spectrum, rather than letting this debate play out solely through competing reports between your White House and the Congressional Budget Office. American citizens, who will collectively carry the weight of this debt for decades, deserve that clarity.

What I will keep following

Mr. President, I will keep closely tracking how the budget figures tied to this law evolve in future columns, particularly as new CBO projections are published and the real effects on Medicaid and the SNAP program are concretely felt across American states. This ongoing journalistic vigilance seems to me the least I owe my readers on a matter of such financial magnitude.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my acknowledged biases

I am a pro-Western columnist who recognizes the firmness of the Trump administration on military and diplomatic matters facing Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, while maintaining a critical eye on its domestic fiscal management. This open letter draws on data from the Congressional Budget Office, the White House, Forbes, RBC, the IRS, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

I hold no formal partisan affiliation and strive to cite nonpartisan budget sources recognized for their methodological rigor, rather than analyses coming exclusively from one political camp or the other.

What I do not know

I cannot predict with certainty the real scale of economic growth this law will generate over the next decade, as estimates vary considerably among the agencies cited. I stick strictly to figures published by recognized institutions, without definitively siding between the administration's optimistic projections and the CBO's more cautious ones.

Sources

Primary sources

White House — The Economic and Fiscal Benefits of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, April 2026

Congressional Budget Office — Dynamic estimate of H.R. 1, One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Internal Revenue Service — One Big Beautiful Bill provisions

Secondary sources

Forbes — One year after Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, here's what actually happened, July 4, 2026

RBC Economics — What's changing with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2026, February 12, 2026

Wikipedia — One Big Beautiful Bill Act, history and fiscal impact

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — What's in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, July 22, 2025