CALL YOUR SENATORS: TELL THEM TO VOTE “NO!” ON THE BIG BUDGET BILL THAT’S GOOD FOR BILLIONAIRES–AND BAD FOR THE REST OF US
The Issue
The U.S. Senate is due to vote on the House-passed tax and spending bill Donald Trump calls “beautiful,” but in truth it’s ugly and dangerous. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the legislation will cut taxes by $3.7 trillion, add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit and lead to at least 13.7 million people losing their health insurance by 2034.
NOW needs your active participation—NOW! Because it will only take four senators to make this vote the one when they stand up to Trump. They’ll do it if you remind them how horrible, dangerous, and destructive this bill is!
It will eliminate over 800,000 good-paying jobs and force Americans to pay up to $170 billion more on electric bills, ending the investments past presidents of both parties have made in clean energy. The U.S. will be forced to depend more on China as about $80 billion in solar and manufacturing jobs will go overseas.
The tax changes will, on average, take $700 a year away from households making less than $51,000 and $1,000 from those making less than $17,000. Meanwhile, the top 0.1% of households (making $4.3 million or more) will gain $389,000.
At least $800 billion will be cut from healthcare programs, forcing 10 million people to lose Medicaid coverage as new barriers to coverage are put in place, and allows the tax credits that help low-and meddle-income families and small business owners afford health coverage to expire.
The bill includes the most devastating attacks on the Affordable Care Act since Trump’s allies tried to largely repeal President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment in 2017. But instead of calling to “end Obamacare,” now they’re pointing to examples of “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid and other government health programs that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
And Planned Parenthood will be defunded under this bill, as it blocks reimbursement for any clinic that provides abortion.
What’s more, the bill includes massive increases in funding for ICE raids, detention, deportations and border militarization, and eliminates the longstanding requirement that protects immigrant children in U.S. custody by permitting indefinite family detention. The bill also includes an approximately $80 billion increase in funding for border wall construction and further militarization of border communities.
TAKE ACTION
WHAT CAN I DO? Please immediatelycall your senators and urge them to vote against the bill. President Trump wants a vote this week—he needs to hear from us! And so does the Senate.
WHAT CAN I DO? Please immediatelycall your senators and urge them to vote against the bill. President Trump wants a vote this week—he needs to hear from us! And so does the Senate.
HOW DO I DO IT? Every Senator can be reached at the U.S. Capitol switchboard at 202–224–3121 and a directory of their contact information can also be found here.
WHAT DO I SAY? My name is (insert name) and as your constituent from (City/Town) I urge you to vote NO on the budget reconciliation bill. Approving this bill puts real people at serious risk, and Sen.. (LAST NAME) needs to stand with (his/her) constituents and vote this big, ugly bill down.
What if robots paid taxes for the jobs they take from us? Bill Gates recently proposed something deceptively simple: if machines are doing the work, they should help fund the roads, schools, and hospitals once supported by human wages and payroll taxes. This isn’t anti-technology—it’s about protecting society from being hollowed out by its own progress.
If Gates sees the risks of what’s coming, why doesn’t Congress? The answer is: it does—and that’s exactly why it’s pulling the plug on the safety net.
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What we see in the House’s 2025 budget isn’t denial. It’s design. It reflects the dominant view among billionaire donors and corporate lobbies: automation is inevitable, and the displaced are expendable. The Republican response isn’t to cushion the blow—it’s to weaponize it. The budget slashes Medicaid and food aid, imposes stricter work requirements, and shifts costs to states—many of which are neither equipped nor willing to respond. These aren’t just fiscal decisions. They’re a blueprint for governing through exclusion.
The public was sold a different story: that immigrants and offshoring destroyed American jobs. That story helped fuel Trump’s rise. But the deeper truth was always this: automation—not immigration—has quietly replaced millions of workers. Even as Trump promised to bring manufacturing home, factories were retooling with machines, not people. Now, AI and humanoid robotics are set to disrupt not just factories, but warehouses, retail, transportation, even eldercare. Some jobs will emerge. Many more will disappear.
And just as this wave crests, the state is retreating from the very programs that people will need to survive it. Not because we can’t afford them—but because the displaced are no longer seen as deserving. A robot tax would require a worldview that values people even when they’re not “productive.” That’s not the worldview driving this budget. What we’re witnessing is a preemptive retreat from responsibility—a government repositioning itself to govern less, punish more, and protect only the profitable.
The robots aren’t coming for your job. They already took it. And the government just told you: you’re on your own.
This is not a new playbook. From the enclosures of early capitalism to the offshoring boom of the 1990s, the pattern has held: privatize the gains, socialize the pain. The only difference now is that the gains are automated—and the pain is being rebranded as deserved.
But pain doesn’t disappear. It becomes political. Displaced workers don’t just vanish—they vote, they protest, they resist. And from the perspective of those in power, they become dangerous. That’s where austerity meets authoritarianism.
The deeper function of this budget isn’t just to shrink the state. It’s to redefine what government is for. Not to care—but to contain. Public goods are stripped away. Surveillance expands. Rights are curtailed. The state steps back from helping the vulnerable—and steps forward to manage them.
This isn’t just a policy shift. It’s a transformation in how value is defined, how power is used, and who gets to belong. We are moving from a moral economy—flawed but still tethered to care—to a market regime where only profit counts. Care work, aging, learning, rest—none of it matters unless it generates revenue. Those who can’t “compete” are no longer treated as citizens. They’re liabilities.
This isn’t a budget. It’s a doctrine. And what it builds is not a stronger society, but a more brittle one—efficient, unequal, and primed for repression.
So here’s the choice. Will automation liberate us—or lock us into deeper hierarchies of exclusion? Gates imagines a society where gains are shared. The House budget imagines one where they’re hoarded—and where those left behind are blamed, not helped.
We can let automation concentrate wealth, deepen inequality, and strip away democracy—or we can fight for a future where people matter more than profit. That choice is still ours—but not for long.
Suggested Readings
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.
Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Ferguson, James. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Susskind, Daniel. A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.
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Stephanie Pitcher approaches legislation like a chess game — methodical, precise and several steps ahead. She passed more bills than any other Democrat in the Republican-controlled legislature this year.
In 2009, Stephanie Pitcher, then the director of the Utah State Women’s Chess Tournament, told The Salt Lake Tribune that she’d spent much of her chess career trying to avoid being boxed in.
Already a five-time chess champion at age 22, Pitcher said she’d taken a break from playing chess for three years during middle school because she “didn’t want to be seen as the nerd.” The game was full of stereotypes, she added, like “chess is nerdy” and “chess is a boys’ game.” She hoped that women would resist those labels.
Now, 16 years and three more chess championships later, Pitcher is a senator representing parts of Salt Lake County, and though she no longer plays much competitive chess, the game has informed her work as one of Utah’s few Democratic lawmakers — and the most successful Democrat during the 2025 legislative session.
This year, she passed 14 bills, more than any other Democrat in the Legislature, and more than all but four Republicans in either chamber. It was a remarkably successful run for a minority party member, which she attributes to her first-hand experience as a prosecutor and defense attorney and her openness to working across the aisle.
“It’s kind of funny,” said Ogden Republican Rep. Ryan Wilcox, who frequently cosponsors legislation with Pitcher. “She runs a lot of small bills, but she’s done her homework enough on them that I can see where she’s going. I can see the end game. It is several steps ahead. It’s exactly like chess with Stephanie.”
‘I don’t run legislation I can’t win’
A week after the 2025 legislative session ended, on a snowy March afternoon, Pitcher and I sat down in her office at the Capitol to play chessand discuss the recent session. The walls of her office were mostly bare — the decor limited largely to a giant chess pawn, a paper sculpture handcrafted by her daughter and a dying cactus — but she was quick to produce a big bag of chess gear.
Pitcher heads up the Capitol Chess Club with Rep. Nelson Abbott, R-Orem, who has the distinction of being the only lawmaker in the state to have beaten Pitcher in a game. He beat her online, she said, after she had gotten “a little cocky.”
“People like to challenge me, of course, so I told [my colleagues] that if they beat me, I would go to conservative caucus,” she said with a smile. Now, she owes them a visit.
“It’s actually worse that they meet at 7 a.m. than the fact that it’s the conservative caucus,” the Senate Democrat said. “That’s just a horrible time for me.”
Republicans make up the majority of Pitcher’s colleagues.
In both the Utah House and Senate, the GOP holds supermajorities and controls the powerful Rules Committees — meaning not only do Republicans not need a single vote from Democrats to pass any given piece of legislation during the 45-day session, but Republicans in each Rules Committee could, theoretically, also prevent any Democrat-sponsored bill from ever getting a vote.
“We all approach our job differently,” Pitcher said. “Generally speaking… I don’t run legislation that I can’t win. I’m never going to win on reproductive rights up here. I’m never going to win on gun control. And so I just decided I’m going to focus on areas where there’s actually an opportunity to improve policy in that space.”
‘My role is to pass good legislation‘
Pitcher attributes some of her success to a numbers game: “There’s definitely benefit to being in the Senate just from the standpoint of there’s fewer of us,” she said.
But a lot of it requires quick and constant strategic thinking. She plans, she explained, where she can compromise and where she can’t, considers how much her bills will — or, more importantly, won’t — cost and assesses how to most effectively present her ideas to her colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
And she hasn’t shied away from sponsoring bills with Republicans who also run legislation she votes against, including Rep. Jordan Teuscher, who sponsored what was likely the session’s most controversial bill — a ban on collective bargaining for public employees — and Reps. Nicholeen Peck and Stephanie Gricius, who have both been the subject of ire from LGBTQ+ groups.
Teuscher, Peck and Gricius did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Part of her reasoning for building such unlikely coalitions, Pitcher said, is principled. “I see the opportunity to work on a bill with one of my colleagues as the opportunity to build a relationship with them and get to know them better and to invest in each other’s ideas,” she said.
And while she hopes colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support her policy work, Pitcher said she doesn’t see the collaborations as an effort to build the left wing in the state.
“Maybe this isn’t the popular thing to say, but I just don’t see it as my role to increase the Democratic makeup of the state of Utah,” she said. “I’m here to pass good legislation on behalf of the people that I represent, and I happen to be a Democrat, but I’m not the flag bearer for the Democratic Party. We have a party for that, and a party chair for that and elected party officials for that role. My role is to pass good legislation.”
Wilcox, who is among Pitcher’s frequent GOP collaborators, said in a recent interview that he was indeed initially skeptical of her. He originally served in the Legislature from 2009 through 2014, and then returned in 2021, when he became the chair of the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice committee. Wilcox took on the role a year after Pitcher successfully passed bail reform legislation aimed at focusing the state on risk, rather than ability to pay, when setting bail.
In his new role as chair, Wilcox said he had been hearing frequent complaints from law enforcement officials about bail reform. “My initial take on the whole thing,” he said, “was she was just a hard-left-wing person, and that’s why she was pushing this stuff.”
Pitcher’s bail reform law was repealed in 2021, and a compromise bill emerged from a special session later that year. Several months later, as lawmakers considered a DNA collection bill, Wilcox and Pitcher found themselves sharing similar concerns, Wilcox said.
“It was just fun,” he remembered. “It was fun to realize that, even as a prosecutor, she wasn’t locked into her in-the-box ideology.”
Wilcox began to see then, he said, that Pitcher was not as he first imagined.
“She’s crazy smart,” Wilcox said. “On the strategic side, on the legislative side — that’s why it’s fun. That’s why I enjoy working with Stephanie, because she understands it’s not about a temporary win.”
Rep. Anthony Loubet, R-Kearns, with whom Pitcher has also cosponsored legislation, shared a similar assessment.
“She’s a great person to work with,” he said. “She obviously has Democrat political views and is able to represent those, but she also understands the legal and the political landscape, so she does a good job of building up relationships and finding common ground.”
And Juliette Osguthorpe, who worked as a staffer for Wilcox during the recent session, said Pitcher’s success made her a topic of conversation among one of the Capitol’s most observant and most frequently overlooked groups: the interns.
“We were talking about kind of the two Democratic strategies in a majority red state,” she said of the interns. “You can either go the route of, ‘My job is to kind of antagonize and make everyone else look bad and force Republicans to respond to all these issues,’ or you can take the route Senator Pitcher has adopted, work on policy and focus on policy and do what you can to make a difference.”
“I think obviously one of those is more effective on the legislative scale,” Osguthorpe added, “and I think you see that with Senator Pitcher.”
‘Knowing where you’re going is the first step’
Asked about Wilcox’s assessment that she makes policy the way she plays chess, Pitcher said she felt he was giving her too much credit. “I want to be part of making good policy, impactful policy,” she said. “I think everything I did run this year, none of it was system shifting… but it is really good policy.”
Her ultimate goal, she said, is to “be able to run hard things.”
Another favorite bill from the recent session, she said, was SB194, which she cosponsored with Republican Rep. Tyler Clancy, who serves as a Provo police officer when he’s not at the Capitol. The legislation allows for inmates in county jails to have better access to evidence in their own cases, an idea born between sessions when Pitcher was trying to visit a client in the Utah County Jail and ended up having to play a video from her laptop through a mail slot for her client.
It was the sort of legislation that has become her specialty: nonpartisan and inexpensive, with a practical fix. It passed both chambers without garnering a single vote against and was signed into law by the governor last month — as was every other bill Pitcher shepherded through the Legislature in 2025.
In her office, after we’d talked for an hour about the recent legislative session, Pitcher set up a board and taught me a lesson: how to checkmate an opponent with two rooks.
“The goal is to find the edge of the board that the king is closest to and where it makes sense for your pieces to start pushing him in that direction,” she explained. “Knowing where you’re going is the first step.”
But I never even had the chance to try using it against her. Later, when we played a game, I exposed my queen early, and she beat me immediately. She knew where she was going all along.
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