Editor’s note: This blog was originally published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) on March 19, 2025, and is cross-posted with permission. The author of the post is Brendan Duke, Senior Director for Federal Fiscal Policy at the Center. CBPP is a member of the Coalition on Human Needs.

We’ve shown how the budget resolution that passed the House last month with only Republican votes would make millions of people worse off by taking away health care and help buying groceries, all to help pay for huge tax giveaways tilted to the wealthy.

Now, thanks to a new analysis from Yale’s Budget Lab, we have a better sense of just what the plan would cost people with low and moderate incomes, compared to the tens of thousands of dollars it would give the nation’s wealthiest each year.

The plan calls for massive cuts in Medicaid and in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that would raise the cost of health care and groceries for people struggling to make ends meet.

The Budget Lab report finds that these assistance cuts would overwhelm whatever paltry tax cuts families in the bottom 40 percent would get, making them significantly worse off.

Families in the bottom 20 percent — whose incomes are below roughly $14,000 — would on net lose an average $1,125 annually, or 5 percent of their income. The second-lowest income group (who earn up to about $38,000) would lose $430, or 1.4 percent. (See chart.)

High-income families, on the other hand, would receive enormous net tax cuts. People in the top 1 percent of incomes (above about $650,000) would gain $43,500 annually, or 2.9 percent, on average.

We already had a sense of how the centerpiece of the House budget — extending the 2017 tax law’s expiring provisions — gives enormous benefits to high-income families, thanks in part to analyses from the Tax Policy Center, U.S. Treasury Department, and Penn Wharton Budget Model. All show that the tax cuts, measured as a share of income, are far larger for the top 1 percent than for low- and moderate-income families.

But these analyses provide an incomplete picture of the House Republican budget plan. They don’t estimate the effects of the plan’s pay-fors, namely how much it would cost families who have their needed benefits cut. The Budget Lab analysis provides a more complete picture by estimating how much the budget’s suggested cuts to Medicaid and SNAP would cost each income group.

The Budget Lab analysis shows that extending the 2017 tax cuts would leave people in the bottom 40 percent of incomes worse off when paired with Medicaid and SNAP cuts, because their tax cuts are so paltry and they would bear the brunt of the spending cuts. This is almost certainly true regardless of any policy specifics, even if it’s unclear precisely what policies House Republicans would put in place to achieve hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

Importantly, the Budget Lab analysis focuses on just a portion of the overall House budget: extending the expiring 2017 tax cuts and assignments to certain committees to cut spending — $230 billion for House Agriculture (the likely source of the SNAP cuts) and $880 billion for House Energy and Commerce Committee (likely Medicaid cuts). It also includes the share of the additional savings that the budget resolution did not allocate to any committee.

Budget Lab assumed the spending cuts came entirely from Medicaid and SNAP. It’s possible that the two committees could cut other programs in their jurisdictions, reducing the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. But it would be impossible for them to avoid enormous SNAP and Medicaid cuts even if they completely eliminated or gutted those other programs or cut Medicare.

Moreover, Budget Lab excludes other policies in the House budget that would likely result in an even more skewed distribution of the budget’s policies. For instance, it didn’t include the $330 billion in cuts assigned to the House Education and Workforce Committee. Based on the “menu” of cuts House Republicans are reportedly considering, the committee may pursue some combination of student loan repayment changes, harming college affordability (including for those no longer in school); cutting Pell grants, which help low- and moderate-income families afford college; and cutting school meals for children, especially those in families with low incomes.

Nor did the Budget Lab include additional tax cuts tilted to the wealthy that President Trump has called for, such as further lowering the corporate tax rate or increasing the amount of state and local taxes families can deduct. Adding those provisions would make the tax cuts for high-income people even larger while doing relatively little for those with low or and moderate incomes. Even Trump’s much-publicized “working class” proposal — “no tax on tips” — would barely add to the tax cuts going to moderate-income families.

Finally, Budget Lab doesn’t analyze which families would eventually bear the burden of the deficit increase that would result from the policies in the House budget (since its tax cuts are larger than its spending cuts). If Congress took the same approach to finance those deficits as the House budget resolution and previous Trump Administration budgets — enormous cuts to programs that low- and moderate-income families count on — then these families would be even worse off than the Budget Lab analysis shows.