UPDATED: An earlier version of this story was published on June 26, before the bill’s passage.

Now that the U.S. House and Senate have passed the budget reconciliation bill, originally titled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the full extent of its impact on public safety is now apparent. While much of the conversation around the bill focused on issues like taxes and entitlement spending, the GOP megabill will also seriously undermine safety across the country.

Normally, when Congress wants to enact major laws, legislators need 60 votes in the Senate to prevent a filibuster—a tactic used to delay or block a bill. Budget reconciliation lets them bypass this process and pass a budget bill with a simple majority of 51 votes. With some strict exceptions, such as Social Security, all provisions in the bill must nominally relate to spending and revenue, as determined by the Senate parliamentarian. However, almost since its inception, reconciliation has been used by legislators to bypass congressional gridlock and pass a broader array of policies, such as the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Congress’s latest deeply unpopular effort comes in at nearly 900 pages. Now that President Trump has signed the bill into law, here are the public safety issues to watch:

1. Dangerous cuts to the safety net

Evidence shows that meeting people’s needs makes communities safer, yet the reconciliation bill could cause an estimated 11.8 million people to lose Medicaid benefits, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). GOP lawmakers also passed major cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a critical food assistance program that helped feed more than 41 million Americans in 2024.

These cuts will cause massive destabilization, especially in communities experiencing poverty, making people less safe. Research has shown time and again that Medicaid expansion is linked to drops in crime. States that expanded Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act rollout saw a decrease in violent crime of more than five percent. Other studies have found the impact of Medicaid expansion on crime to be even greater. Medicaid expansions have also been found to reduce the number of times a person released from prison is reincarcerated within a year by more than 11 percent. On the other hand, when people lose health care coverage offered through Medicaid, crime rates climb.

Similarly, there is extensive evidence that wider access to SNAP benefits reduces crime, with studies showing that lifting SNAP restrictions leads to lower rearrest rates and reduced intimate partner violence, among other safety-related benefits. If we are serious about improving public safety, research suggests that we should be investing in health care and social supports, not slashing programs that make people safer.

2. Harmful work requirements for public benefits

The reconciliation bill expands work requirements for people to be eligible for Medicaid and SNAP, including for parents and caretakers of children over 14. Republican leadership argues that requiring people to work 80 hours a month in order to be eligible for these benefits will ensure the country’s safety net helps “the truly needy.” However, research shows that these harmful restrictions will only make it less likely that people who need these programs most will benefit from them.

This policy will particularly hurt the estimated 450,000 people released from state and federal prisons every year. People leaving prison face immense barriers to finding employment, from lack of access to education behind bars to discrimination based on their conviction history, which is still legal in many states. A 2021 report showed that a third of people could not find employment within four years of leaving federal prison. This is one reason that formerly incarcerated people are 10 times more likely to experience homelessness than the general public.

If we want to address people’s needs and prevent crime, we should make sure that people who have completed their sentences are met with opportunities, not further punishment and barriers to success. This could include lifting conviction-related restrictions on public benefits, restoring grants for reentry services that have been cut, passing the bipartisan Clean Slate Act to seal some conviction records, automatically enrolling people leaving prison in benefits like health care, and providing cash benefits to help people build stable lives after prison (as in a California pilot program that successfully reduced recidivism). Returning home after prison is hard enough, and the stability of our communities depends on making it easier—not harder.

3. Drastic increases in spending on immigration detention and cuts to immigrant services

The United States immigration detention system is an inhumane affront to due process. Despite extensive documentation of overcrowding, medical neglect, starvation, forced labor, forced sterilization, family separation, and other horrors, the reconciliation bill provides roughly $150 billion for immigration enforcement and detention, including $45 billion to build and expand prison-like immigration detention facilities and $30 billion to expand ICE enforcement—ballooning the already massive Department of Homeland Security budget, diverting funds away from critical programs that make us safe, and destabilizing communities in the process.

This expansion—indeed, immigration detention as a whole—is  entirely unnecessary. The federal government’s own data shows that detention  does not deter migration, and detention is not necessary to ensure that people  appear in court  for immigration hearings. And with the erosion of due process and cuts to critical federal legal services—including the Legal Orientation Program, the Legal Orientation Program for Custodians of Unaccompanied Children, and National Qualified Representation Program —many people may be denied even the most basic access to legal counsel.

The reconciliation bill also adds eligibility restrictions to immigrant families seeking health care, child tax credits, and food aid while instituting massive new immigration fees, including a $1,000 fee for people attempting to claim asylum. People seeking asylum, safety, and stability in the United States—those fleeing war or persecution and attempting to remain with their families—are among the least likely to be able to afford hefty fees.

All these anti-immigrant policies and investments will only serve to make the country less safe for people navigating the immigration system.

Some harmful provisions did not make the final bill

During its marathon “vote-a-rama” session, the Senate struck a 10-year moratorium on regulation of AI from the bill. The provision would have encouraged governments at the state and local levels to promote AI use, while also barring them from limiting or preventing harmful AI deployment through administrative policies. This would have blocked states from enforcing essential civil protections, effectively creating a vacuum for unchecked AI use unless states criminalized violations. Rigorous oversight is essential for AI technologies that rely on complex algorithms and large language models, as these can produce biased outputs and perpetuate discriminatory errors.

In addition, the House version of the reconciliation bill proposed changes to the Pell Grant program that would have particularly harmed incarcerated students. Pell Grants provide access to life-changing education for millions of students who can’t afford college tuition, including students behind bars. Fortunately, the Senate’s version, which did not add major exclusions to Pell, was more supportive of college students in prison, and prevailed in the debate. Further, the bill may benefit incarcerated students through the so-called “Workforce Pell” provision, which allows Pell Grants to fund nondegree programs like technical and professional certifications. Education is one of the strongest tools to break the cycle of incarceration. The federal government should be expanding access to education in prison, not limiting it.

The bottom line

The Trump administration has already done immense harm to the nation’s public safety infrastructure. Now, Congress has done even greater harm through the reconciliation bill. It will fall to states, localities, and the private sector—and eventually, future congresses—to counteract this damage.