Insight Kansas Column for June: A Final Plea Regarding Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (and Also Public Broadcasting, and More)

(I normally only share my Insight Kansas column here after it has appeared in Kansas newspapers, but since this column’s plea is EXTREMELY timely, I thought it couldn’t hurt to throw it out early. Enjoy, everyone!)

Image credit: Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector

Dear Senator Moran,

It’s me again, writing another of the no doubt thousands of letters and e-mails and texts that you’ve received over the past month, ever since the House of Representatives approved—by a one-vote margin—President Trump’s beloved One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That bill is coming to the floor of the Senate, with the voting on it beginning perhaps as soon as Thursday. So this column is almost certainly too late to influence whatever decisions you and your fellow senators will make. But for the sake of the people of Kansas, I’ll reiterate a few points once more, just for the record.

First, some praise. The Senate version of the bill gets rid of the House version’s cuts to PELL grant eligibility, as well as its ill-conceived “risk sharing” plan, which would have made colleges and universities responsible for unpaid student loans, a measure that could devastate Kansas’s 21 independent (and mostly religious) institutions of higher education.

So that’s good! (Though it’s worth noting that the Senate’s idea of restricting PLUS loans for graduate school and perhaps simply prohibiting students seeking degrees in “low earning” programs from obtaining any federal student loans at all reflects a STEM bias that could, over time, disrupt music, arts, and humanities education throughout the state of Kansas.)

Beyond higher education, though, there is much else for Kansans to worry about.

Kansas has over 300 hospitals and clinics serving rural populations, many of which depend heavily upon Medicaid. The Senate version of the bill caps the ability of states like Kansas to tax various providers (such as health care businesses and managed care organizations), which might end up costing Kansas close to $4 billion in Medicaid funding, which would likely mean perhaps over 10000 Kansans losing coverage and the rate of rural hospital closure increasing further. Voting for this would not only be bad policy, but considering the support Medicaid enjoys in the state of Kansas (more than 70% of all Kansans support Medicaid expansion), it would be undemocratic.

There are over 175,000 veterans living in Kansas, with over 30,000 of them struggling with homelessness, and hundreds who currently receive housing assistance through the Veterans Administration. But the House version of Trump’s OBBB cuts over $33 billion in housing assistance out of the budget. The VA has already been forced to end its Servicing Purchase program, which provided mortgage relief to tens of thousands of veterans; if the Senate version doesn’t change this policy, and the bill passes, hundreds of Kansas veterans will suffer.

Kansas is a leader in renewable energy; over 40% of the electricity generated here comes from wind, creating an energy market that has attracted over $11 billion in investment over the past decade. The House version of the bill includes deep cuts to the tax supports and rebates that renewable energy industries and consumers receive, which have enabled them to thrive. The Senate version does delay the roll-out of some of those cuts, but ought to get rid of them entirely.

There is more I could mention, some of which isn’t in the One Big Beautiful Bill but is tagging alongside it (the proposed devastating rescission of funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, for example). As a conservative Republican, I recognize that you likely have a very different perspective on some of these matters than I. Still, when it comes to Kansas’s small colleges and universities, Kansas’s struggling veterans, Kansas’s rural hospitals, and Kansas’s renewable energy entrepreneurs, I think we can agree on where this state’s interests lie. I hope you’ll vote accordingly.

Best,

Russell Arben Fox