(The Epoch Times)—Democrats are signaling plans to make the One Big Beautiful Bill Act endorsed by President Donald Trump a central focus of their push to reclaim the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the party’s House campaign arm, said in a July 1 memo that political messaging from now until the 2026 election will emphasize what it sees as the harmful effects of the bill, which the DCCC has dubbed the “Big, Ugly Bill.”
“In May, we told you a vote for the Big, Ugly Bill would be the defining contrast of the midterm election and cost Republicans the House majority,” the memo stated. “House Republicans didn’t just pass their Tax Scam once – they’re being forced by their D.C. Party Bosses to double down and vote for it again, pushing through a disgusting abomination that will hurt everyday Americans to give massive tax breaks to billionaires.”
After clearing the Senate in a dramatic 51–50 vote on July 1 in which Vice President JD Vance broke the tie, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act now heads back to the House, where Republicans are seeking to pass it and send it to the president’s desk for his signature ahead of a self-imposed July 4 deadline.
Trump, speaking after the Senate vote, said he expects the bill to advance smoothly in the House. Previously, he called it “one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of our country,” praising it for provisions that “secure our borders, turbocharge our economy, and bring back the American dream.”
Democrats have sharply criticized the legislation, saying it would cut services for working families, such as health care and food assistance, while delivering tax benefits to the wealthy. The DCCC said it plans to hammer this message as part of its strategy to unseat vulnerable Republicans in next year’s elections.
“From now until November 2026, the DCCC will continue to communicate the harm this bill will cause, uplift stories of the everyday Americans negatively impacted, and mobilize voters through traditional and non-traditional organizing tactics, earned media, and paid communications in order to hold vulnerable Republicans accountable for abandoning their central promise to voters,” the DCCC said in the memo.
The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the GOP’s campaign arm for House races, rebutted the DCCC’s description of the bill.
“The One Big, Beautiful Bill is a big, beautiful opportunity to show how Republicans are delivering results and Democrats are once again increasing taxes on hardworking Americans and putting politics over people,” NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “We won’t let voters forget Democrats’ betrayal next fall.”
Marinella also pointed to internal GOP polling showing strong public support for key provisions in the bill, including efforts to remove deceased or ineligible recipients from Medicaid rolls (86 percent support), require citizenship verification for Medicaid eligibility (82 percent), and impose work requirements (72 percent). He cited battleground polling indicating that 82 percent of voters would be less likely to support a Democrat who voted for tax increase that Republicans say amounts to more than $3,000 per year for the average household.
Republicans say that Democrats, by opposing the One Big Beautiful Bill, are effectively seeking to raise taxes on Americans, since Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2025 without further action.
GOP leaders say that extending those tax cuts is crucial to sustaining economic growth, shielding middle-class families from higher taxes, and maintaining U.S. business competitiveness. They also say the bill’s provisions on border security and defense spending are essential for national security, dismissing Democratic criticisms as partisan fear-mongering.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in both chambers have echoed the DCCC’s critique of the bill.
“Senate Republicans just passed Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said on social media. “The extreme GOP budget hurts everyday Americans and rewards their billionaire donors. House Democrats will fight on with every righteous tool we have available.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and the House Republican leadership team have voiced optimism that the House will pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ahead of the July 4 deadline.
The House is scheduled to vote on the legislation on July 2.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
