(The Epoch Times)—Senators on Monday morning will begin a marathon vote series dubbed a “vote-a-rama” to pass their version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with the vote expected to go late into the day, possibly wrapping up sometime on Tuesday.
The legislation, resulting from weeks of intra-party and bicameral negotiations among House and Senate Republicans, would implement sweeping changes to U.S. policy and funding over a 10-year window in order to carry out President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda.
Trump hopes for final passage of the bill by July 4. The Senate earlier approved advancing the legislation in a 51–49 vote, in which Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Thom Willis (R-N.C.) joined Democrats in voting against the procedural measure.
The vote series on the mammoth bill, clocking in at over 940 pages, comes after a 16-hour reading of the package beginning-to-end on the Senate floor as requested by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
The Congressional Budget Office projected in updated estimates released on June 27 that the reconciliation budget bill will increase the deficit by around $3.25 trillion, touching on practically every area of American policy and the budget—albeit within the confines set by the filibuster-proof reconciliation process being used to advance the legislation.
Here are the main components of the bill.
2017 Tax Cuts Extended
The centerpiece of the legislation is its extension of the tax cuts initially included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 during Trump’s first term in office.
That bill slashed marginal tax rates across the board, with most brackets seeing around a 2 to 4 percent cut. If these cuts aren’t extended, tax rates will return to their pre-2017 levels at the end of fiscal year 2025 on Sept. 30—an eventuality that Republicans are anxious to avoid.
Child Tax Credit Boosted
The bill would boost the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to $2,200, as well as extend the credit permanently.
Reduced Taxes on Overtime, Car Loans, Tips
The bill would implement some of Trump’s core campaign promises on tax policy, reducing taxes on tips, overtime pay, and car loans.
The bill would allow deducting the first $25,000 in income from tips, deducting up to $12,500 in income from overtime pay for single filers or up to $25,000 for joint filers, and deducting up to $10,000 for car loan interest on American-made vehicles.
$6,000 Social Security Deduction for Seniors
Instead of Trump’s “no taxes on Social Security,” the bill would allow seniors to deduct $6,000 of their Social Security income, with that amount reducing once income passes $75,000 for single filers or $150,000 for joint filers.
Single filers who make $175,000 or more, or joint filers with an income of over $250,000, will not be eligible for the deduction.
Funding Immigration and Border Security
The legislation would dedicate $150 billion towards immigration enforcement in line with some of the core promises Trump made on the campaign trail.
That includes nearly $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency largely responsible for carrying out Trump’s mass deportation operation, alongside $13.5 billion in grants for state and local governments who assist with the effort. The bill allocates $45 billion for detention of illegal immigrants.
Another $46.5 billion is dedicated for the construction of a border wall along the U.S.–Mexico border.
The funding will cover through the end of fiscal year 2029.
Defense
The bill would appropriate $157 billion towards defense—$29 billion would go towards enhancing U.S. maritime capabilities and shipbuilding, $25 billion is slated for munitions, and $25 billion would be for Israel’s Golden Dome missile defense project.
The funding will cover through the end of fiscal year 2029.
Clean Energy Tax Credits
Several clean energy tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act are being cut, beginning as early as this year.
The electric vehicle tax credit would end on Sept. 30. Other clean energy projects, including hydrogen, wind, and solar, would need to be online by either Dec. 31, 2027, or Jan. 1, 2028, depending on the type of project.
The bill would tax new wind and solar projects for using specific foreign-made components.
Medicaid and Rural Hospitals
The bill would seek to reduce Medicaid spending by imposing an 80-hour monthly work requirement for able-bodied adults to receive the program.
It also reduces the “provider tax”—the rate at which states tax hospitals and doctors to pay for their Medicaid programs—from 6 percent to 3.5 percent in states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Ten states that didn’t expand their programs will see no changes.
To offset fears that these changes would harm rural hospitals, the bill allocates $25 billion to support such sites.
SNAP Cuts
The bill would, for the first time, require states to contribute to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments, commonly known as food stamps. The amount would be variable based on a state’s payment error rate but would fall between 5 and 15 percent.
It would also increase states’ share of administrative costs to 75 percent, up from their current 50 percent rate.
$5 Trillion Debt Ceiling Increase
The bill would increase the U.S. debt ceiling by $5 trillion. This provision is one of the most pressing items in the bill as the Treasury approaches a default sometime in the coming months.
Paul and House conservatives have been outspoken in their opposition to such a steep increase in the debt limit.
$40,000 SALT Cap
One of the most divisive issues in crafting the bill has been the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction, which was capped at $10,000 in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The Senate bill will increase that cap to $40,000 annually, increasing by 1 percent for five years instead of the 10 years initially sought by its supporters as a compromise. Beginning 2030, the cap will return to $10,000.
SALT allows tax payers to deduct a portion of their state and local taxes from their federal taxable income. The program is controversial with conservatives, who view it as favoring blue state taxpayers more than those in comparably low-tax red states.
However, House moderates like Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) have made an increased SALT cap a redline to win their vote.
Education Policies Tweaked
The bill would make several tweaks to federal education policy.
It would reduce Pell Grant eligibility for high-income students and students with a full-ride. It proposes two federal student loan repayment plans, including one traditional repayment plan and one income-based repayment plan.
Additionally, it would tax college and university endowments at a variable rate—either 1.4 percent, 4 percent, or 8 percent—based on their wealth.
Restrictions on Regulating AI
A provision in the bill would require that states refrain from regulating artificial intelligence (AI) for 10 years as a condition to receive their portion of a newly-created $500 million broadband fund.
What Was Cut
The Senate’s nonpartisan referee, parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, ruled against many provisions ineligible for passage under the filibuster-proof process in earlier Senate committee drafts of the legislation. Had they not been cut, Republicans would need 60 votes to pass the reconciliation bill.
Those provisions included one empowering states to enforce immigration law, multiple provisions relating to the federal workforce, and a provision financially rewarding cost-cutting measures by agencies.
Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) proposal to sell off federal lands, which caused a firestorm of controversy online, was also left out.
Another proposal to cut the $200 excise tax, and regulations on silencers and certain types of firearms was also ruled ineligible for the reconciliation process.
The AI policy wrapped into the final text was also altered from an earlier version, which didn’t make the prohibition a condition of receiving broadband funding.
Republicans also removed a measure dubbed a “revenge tax“ that would have let Trump impose retributory taxes on foreign companies from nations that tax U.S. firms. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that after negotiations, the provision was no longer necessary.
MacDonough also rejected a pay cut for Federal Reserve employees and a repeal of programs authorized by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, among other rulings that would have to pass through the chamber as regular bills.
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.
