Dear Representative:
On behalf of the AFL-CIO, I am writing to express our strong opposition to the FY 2025 Budget Resolution (H. Con. Res. 14) scheduled for floor consideration this week.
H. Con. Res. 14 instructs congressional committees to engage in the same-old same-old: target children, the poor, working people, and middle class families in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Under this resolution, committees are invited to pay for those tax cuts by making life harder for regular, everyday people. And as life is made harder, the resolution provides a scapegoat, pointing at the southern border, so people might blame the most vulnerable among us for all the pain that’s about to be inflicted.
The FY 2025 Budget Resolution promises to drive up costs for families in healthcare, food and education, heighten economic risks for the nation, and worsen poverty and hardship. The assault on critical programs suggested by this resolution would mean job loss for public servants in local, state, and federal government, nurses and other health care workers, food workers, construction workers, and more. It would mean more debt for families, more sickness, and less access to health care and education.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, finding savings to pay for the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts allowed for in this budget would put 36 million people at risk of losing Medicaid health care coverage. Major cuts in Medicaid funding for hospitals, nursing homes, mental health programs, and community health centers would jeopardize jobs and curtail access in rural and urban areas. Jobs ranging from nursing home workers and substance abuse and mental health professionals to OB-GYN and midwives would become at risk. In addition, more than 40 million people could receive less from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to secure food, and millions more could lose food assistance altogether. Cuts in SNAP would put at risk jobs such as grocery store employees, meatpackers, meat and poultry processors and agricultural workers.
The FY 2025 Budget Resolution could also be used to raise the costs of student loans and target federal workers’ hard-earned retirement and benefit programs. It’s also deeply concerning that these instructions could put at risk hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country in energy, infrastructure and other sectors.
H. Con. Res. 14 includes increased funding likely targeted at immigration. As a nation, we already spend more on immigration enforcement than all other forms of federal law enforcement combined. Meanwhile, gutting the staff, budgets and mandates of our labor agencies are gifts to abusive bosses that will embolden wage theft, health and safety violations, sexual harassment, and child labor exploitation in workplaces around the country. The real threat workers face is corporate greed, not immigrants.
Moreover, recent economic analysis shows that this plan for extending tax cuts for the rich on the backs of working families promises to drag down economic growth for years to come.1
Working families must not be stuck, yet again, with the bill for trillions of dollars in tax giveaways for billionaires and big corporations. We urge you to oppose this FY 2025 Budget Resolution.
Sincerely,
Jody Calemine
Director, Government Affairs
1 See Josh Bivens, “There will be pain,” Economic Policy Institute (February 13, 2025), at https://www.epi.org/publication/tcja-extensions-2025/