In his recent op-ed, Republican Sen. Jon Husted praises the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” as a “gift” to working Ohioans (“Why budget law is tailored to help Ohio families,” Aug. 3.) Please let me set the record straight. This legislation isn’t beautiful, it’s brutal. It’s not for working families, it’s for billionaires. It doesn’t strengthen our communities; it hollows them out. And BBB leaves our most medically vulnerable without the medical insurance they need. The BBB is cruel, lopsided, and a budget buster.

As dean of the Ohio delegation and a lifelong advocate for Ohio, I have never seen a bill so egregiously tilted toward the ultra-wealthy at the expense of our working people and retirees.

The legislation makes health care more expensive, eliminates food assistance, guts clean energy investment and hands out trillions of dollars in gigantic, permanent tax breaks to billionaires — all while driving our national debt into deeper peril. Deficit hawks take note: The fiscal conservatives’ new law will add $4.1 trillion to our national debt during the next 10 years. That is addition, not subtraction, confirmed by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.

Proponents will point to the tax cuts justification for this carnage. It’s true — as a result of this bill, President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and the billionaire class will get tax breaks of $340,000 each year permanently, while a tipped worker will get 57 cents an hour more on average. A senior citizen who is working at McDonald’s will actually see their taxes go up, as they don’t receive tips and McDonald’s doesn’t give overtime hours or pay. While billionaire tax breaks are permanent, provisions to limit taxes on tips, taxes on overtime and the new tax deductions for senior citizens expire after only 3 years.

Now let’s address what this bill actually does to health care.

The BBB will cause rising costs of health and pharmaceutical coverage for all Ohioans. Nearly 17 million Americans will lose their health care. Close to 500,000 Ohioans will lose health care entirely. These are our neighbors, our elders and our children. This bill cuts more than $1 trillion from Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act combined. It will force those making as little as $1,300 a month to pay higher copays or forgo care altogether. What kind of nation punishes the sick for being poor?

A cruel one.

The impact on seniors and the disabled is particularly barbaric. This legislation guts funding for long-term care, threatening to kick out elderly and disabled Ohioans from the nursing and senior living facilities they rely on and call home. Our rural hospitals, already stretched thin, face closure, putting entire communities at risk of losing emergency services. We estimate nearly 30,000 people in Northwest Ohio will lose access to medical care entirely. That is not reform. That is abandonment.

And while the GOP boasts about “pro-growth” policies, the bill also delivers the largest rollback in clean energy investment in U.S. history.

Ohioans received more than $150 million in clean energy tax credits in 2023 alone to modernize and make energy more affordable. Manufacturing companies in fierce global competition had tax credits terminated that will hand business opportunity to our foreign competitors. As home energy costs rise, the BBB also halted the deployment of energy-efficient housing programs including ending the residential clean energy credit. The result? Average electric bills will rise by 10 percent more, costing working families an additional $400 a year according to policy think tank Energy Innovation.

What’s more, the bill eliminates more than 800,000 clean energy jobs nationwide and shutters more than $500 billion in private investment. It threatens 1,750,000 construction jobs and more than 3 billion work hours — a devastating blow to our building trades and the working-class economy. That translates to a whopping $148 billion in lost wages and benefits. This is not an all-of-the-above energy strategy, it’s a give clean energy jobs to Communist China forever strategy.

While families are losing health care, SNAP and energy support, what are billionaires getting? A windfall.

Despite the national debt having already ballooned past $36 trillion, this bill doubles down on failed policies and adds another $3.4 trillion to our debt during the next decade. It adds hundreds of billions more in tax giveaways, rewarding those who need help the least while demanding even greater sacrifice from those with the least to give. This is nothing less than the largest redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history.

The bill also strips away food assistance from 316,000 Ohioans. Nearly 1 in 4 SNAP recipients, including women, children, seniors and veterans will face further food challenges.

The program will be cut by $186 billion for nutritional aid during the next decade. Those most in need — children — will be the hardest hit. While this law freezes SNAP benefits, grocery prices go higher and higher and our farmers lose access to local customers.

Even the price of beef is up 12 percent over a year ago. In turn, this will hurt local grocers across Ohio who stand to lose $103 million each month based on data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Our farmers, producers and growers will lose more from direct purchases as federal crop loss insurance payments fill the gap — “farming the mailbox.” As the U.S. loses global markets, this devolution will be a blow to Main Street businesses and legacy family farms. Economic lifelines from real production in small towns across our region will continue to wither.

Let me state my position clearly: I support economic growth and responsible budgeting. Economic growth must lift all boats — not just the super-yacht class. I support investments in American manufacturing, agriculture, broadband access and career training programs. But none of those goals are achieved by cutting the legs out from under working families, draining our safety net, and handing the proceeds over to Wall Street’s big money centers and “gold fingers” on the coasts.

The BBB bill has been called by many names, but at its core it is a betrayal of hardworking Ohioans.

We are not fooled. We are not disposable. We know what it means to work hard, to raise families, to care for our aging parents, and to hope for a better tomorrow for our children. This bill doesn’t help us do any of that. It will set us back decades. Many communities may never recover.

America can and must do better for our people. Tipped workers, overtime workers and seniors who work deserve better than 68 cents a day in tax relief.

America’s steady progress forward will begin again when the billionaire bonanza raid on the U.S. Treasury is contained. Congress must pass policies that put working people first–not just in words, but in dollars and deeds. What Americans make and grow makes and grows America.

(Kaptur, a Democrat, represents Ohio’s 9th Congressional District in the northwestern part of the state. She has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1983, and is the longest-serving woman in the history of Congress.)