By a single vote, U.S. House Republicans passed the massive package of spending legislation pushed by President Donald Trump early Thursday morning — the so-called “big beautiful bill” that would fund trillions of dollars of tax cuts over the next decade by cutting Medicaid, SNAP benefits and countless other programs. It also puts more money towards the military and immigration enforcement.

The bill next heads to the Senate, where Republican leaders will likely change it significantly and send it back to the House.

Every Democrat opposed the bill, along with three Republican holdouts (one of whom voted “present” instead of “no”). Arkansas’s four congressmen — all Republicans — voted yes, despite the fact it’s expected to slash food and health benefits for tens of thousands of their own constituents if it becomes law.

There’s much we still don’t know about the package, which runs to over a thousand pages and was still undergoing substantial revisions up until the final House vote. According to The New York Times, one of those last-minute changes involved pushing up the effective date of the bill’s work requirements for Medicaid expansion recipients to the end of 2026. They were originally slated to take effect in 2029 — that is, after the next presidential election — but some deficit-conscious hard-right Republicans insisted on bigger cuts. The final bill still delays them until after the 2026 midterms. 

As reporter Phillip Powell explained in the Arkansas Times last week, the bill would also dramatically expand work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. States would be required to take on more of the cost of the program, which is currently funded by the federal government.

Those changes would affect Arkansas dramatically. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, released figures last week showing state-by-state how many people are at risk of losing benefits if the bill passes into law. 

With Medicaid, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’ analysis estimates 95,000 Arkansans could lose coverage over the next decade due to the proposed work requirement, which would apply to most non-disabled adults between the ages of 19 and 64. The national figure would be almost 7 million, the group says. 

To derive those numbers, analysts looked at Arkansas’s short-lived 2018 experiment with work requirements under former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, which is one of the only times a state has actually implemented a work rule under Medicaid. (It was blocked by a federal judge after roughly six months and later rescinded by the Biden administration.) Though Hutchinson’s work requirement was in some ways less stringent than what congressional Republicans are now proposing, it led to 18,000 Arkansans losing their insurance — despite the fact that many of them were likely working at least part-time and simply may have not filled out the paperwork required by the state. 

Arkansas’s Medicaid expansion program, ARHOME, currently provides insurance to about 230,000 adults. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that only about 13% of those Arkansas enrollees actually didn’t work over the last year and also wouldn’t qualify for some sort of exemption under the Republican bill. (The work requirement doesn’t apply to parents caring for dependent children, for example.) While the data suggests only 13% wouldn’t meet the new work requirement, the group predicted far more — likely 35% — would lose coverage for failing to meet burdensome paperwork and reporting requirements.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the expanded SNAP work requirement would put around 60,000 Arkansans at risk of losing some level of food benefits, a number that includes households with school-age kids at home.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families said Thursday the bill would “worsen hunger and strip health care coverage from millions of families — to partially offset trillions in tax cuts.” Here’s their full statement:

The House’s reconciliation bill drives up costs for low-income Arkansans by taking away health care coverage and the SNAP benefits they use to buy food for their kids; increasing the cost of electricity; and making college less affordable. It is an attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid, which have saved countless lives by expanding health care coverage and making it less expensive.

People don’t want to pass more tax breaks at the expense of funding for health care and food assistance. They don’t want people who are lawfully in the country — refugees, people granted asylum, and victims of trafficking — to have their food assistance and health coverage terminated. They don’t want to spend billions to separate families. And they don’t want to mortgage our future by driving up deficits.

For more than half a century, the federal government has been committed to cutting poverty, but this bill abandons our shared vision of creating a country where everyone has a fair shot at opportunity. The bill now moves to the Senate, where senators have the chance to denounce these devastating cuts that will erase years of progress. We need senators to stand up for Arkansans and demonstrate a real commitment to help struggling people in this country by rejecting this reckless plan.

Additional Information About the Reconciliation Bill

• More than $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces over 10 years, resulting in about 15 million people losing health care coverage. We estimate that tens of thousands of Arkansans would become newly uninsured.
• Nearly $300 billion in cuts to SNAP, which would take away or cut food assistance for millions of people including 2 million or more children — and could end the program entirely in some states. A proposed cost shift to states could leave Arkansas footing the bill for more than $109 million in an unfunded mandate.
• A tax plan that would increase deficits by $3.1 trillion over 10 years, providing an average tax cut of roughly $90,000 to households earning more than $1 million a year in 2027, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts — and bear the brunt of cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. More than 200,000 Arkansas children in the state’s lowest-income families would be left out of even the temporary increase in the Child Tax Credit.

Learn more about the impact of the House budget reconciliation bill on Arkansas here.