Through a series of closed-door meetings, overnight votes, and empty promises, House Republicans passed a tax scheme that will kick sixteen million Americans off their health care, skyrocket the cost of food, and funnel massive giveaways to Big Oil while gutting investments in clean-energy jobs. The resulting revenues will fund massive tax breaks for Republican lawmakers, their wealthy donors, and huge corporations.

At its core, the bill defies logic. It is as politically unpopular as it is bad for the economic well-being of the majority of Americans. It’s so catastrophic that you’d expect more than a handful of congressional Republicans to publicly raise concerns about the political cost. But as Senate Republicans now scramble to try to pass the bill by the July 4 deadline demanded by President Donald Trump, the majority aren’t taking their cues from their constituents. They’re listening to the wealthiest Americans and big businesses who’ve gamed the political system to their benefit.

How do we know? Just look at who’s funding the fight.

One of the leading groups running advertisements supporting the “Big, Beautiful Betrayal” is the American Action Network. The conservative dark money group spent $4 million to assert that the tax bill will help ordinary Americans, conveniently leaving out the cuts the bill would make to Medicaid and how it would sunset Affordable Care Act subsidies.

It’s no coincidence the group is peddling a narrative endorsed by big drug companies. Since 2020, the lobbying group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America has funneled a staggering $17.5 million to the American Action Network.

Then there’s ultraconservative billionaire Charles Koch. After receiving over $72 million from the oil and gas industry between 2020 and 2024, Koch’s Americans for Prosperity announced a $4 million push to pass the billionaire tax cuts.

And lastly, private equity groups, who have systematically increased the cost of living by invading industries from medicine to housing to food, have spent at least $7 million fighting to keep a provision in the reconciliation bill that makes it possible for Wall Street executives to pay less in taxes than the average firefighter, teacher, and small business owner.

In total, we’re talking about an eight-figure push from special interests to pass a bill that cuts taxes for the few while gutting health care and other benefits for tens of millions. The so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that Trump cares so deeply about passing isn’t for the American people. It was designed and paid for by big businesses and their benefactors.

Congressional Republicans have spent plenty of time talking about how they care about hardworking everyday Americans, how they will lower costs for them and bring jobs back home, and how they will rein in the deficit. But actions speak far louder than their empty words.

If Republican lawmakers cared about their constituents, they wouldn’t be shoving through a bill that 70 percent of rural Americans are worried will leave more adults and children in their communities uninsured, they wouldn’t be passing a scam that will increase the national deficit by $2.4 trillion, and they certainly wouldn’t sign off on a plan that disproportionately benefits the very wealthy.

Their tax scam represents a complete and utter abandonment of the Americans that Trump and Republicans promised they’d put first. We deserve better.