Dear Representative:
I am writing to urge you to vote no on the Senate Amendment to H.R. 1. The AFL-CIO, its affiliates, and working people from around the country have been sounding the alarm about how this bill would kick millions from their health care coverage and food assistance, how it promises to spike energy and health care costs for the average family, and how its tax benefits overwhelmingly favor the rich while its overall effects will decrease the average income of those at the bottom half of the ladder.
But in these final hours, as you consider how to cast your vote, I ask you to consider your legacy.
Beyond making the necessities of life – health care, energy, and food – less accessible and less affordable so that the nation’s wealthiest households can avoid paying their fair share, the bill’s legacy is one of job destruction.
Its major provisions create a series of job-destroying cliffs, one after another.
The ACA Jobs Cliff. H.R. 1 lets the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium subsidies expire starting in 2026. This expiration will lead to the loss of health care coverage for millions of workers and then the loss of 300,000 jobs in health care and beyond. But the assault on health care jobs does not stop there, not even close.
The Medicaid Jobs Cliff. The bill begins cutting Medicaid by almost $1 trillion, starting in earnest in 2027, maximizing its various cost-shifting measures beginning in 2028. Those Medicaid cliffs will lead to the destruction of over 600,000 jobs in health care. Some of those jobs will be lost because entire hospitals and nursing homes will simply close. A temporary rural hospital relief fund, scheduled to expire in five years, was added at the last minute in the Senate, but it is too small and too short-lived to make up the difference.
The SNAP Jobs Cliff. Year by year, the bill turns up the dial on cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). First, unnecessary work requirements – red tape on workers designed to snag hungry families on a technicality and deny them food assistance – begin right away. Then, in 2026, 2027, and 2028, more and more measures are implemented to push obligations onto states that simply cannot afford them. Once those measures are fully in place
in 2028, the full swing of job loss in the food supply chain will take shape – from farms to grocery stores and everywhere in between, including the state and local government employees who administer these programs. One estimate puts the total job loss with Medicaid and SNAP cuts combined at more than 1.2 million jobs by 2029.
The Energy Jobs Cliff. The bill slashes the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tax credits for energy jobs and imposes onerous conditions on them. These investments already spurred a historic boom in manufacturing starts and construction employment, and were poised to support hundreds of thousands of jobs in construction, manufacturing, mining, and the power sector. Instead, year-by-year, H.R. 1 sunsets key tax credits early and makes credits harder to access, starting with electric vehicle and residential energy credits this year, credits for charging infrastructure in 2026, and credits for hydrogen, solar, and wind projects in 2027. These are projects that would have created good-paying jobs and apprenticeship programs with pathways to the middle class. Almost every state is slated to lose investments and thousands of good energy jobs exactly when we need to meet increased energy demand with more investments and jobs in energy, transmission, and their supply chains. One estimate finds the repeal of clean vehicle tax credits alone puts tens of thousands of current and planned manufacturing jobs in battery and auto assembly on the chopping block. This short-sighted approach to energy will make electricity bills climb, further burdening working class families and U.S.-based manufacturing plants, which are major electricity consumers, while ceding critical supply chains and energy technologies to China. In every direction, jobs are threatened by this divestment.
The Mass Deportation Jobs Sinkhole. The foregoing are all spending decreases that destroy jobs, but the bill contains spending increases that also destroy jobs. When all is said and done, H.R. 1 will have increased our spending on the mass deportation agenda to 80 times what we spend on labor standards enforcement. As workplace raids heighten, the Administration strips immigrants of their lawful status, and workers and their families fear arrest and detention without due process, industries are disrupted. That disruption breaks the supply chain, causing ripple effects of layoffs and closures. The estimated job destruction from this poorly conceived but richly funded mass deportation agenda amounts to 5.9 million jobs lost, including 3.3 million for immigrant workers and 2.6 million for U.S.-born workers. Rather than a cliff, these job losses will come in fits and starts, at the mercy of surprise raids and accumulating over time, more like an ever-expanding sinkhole than a cliff.
The Social Security Cliff. Another legacy is the cliff that we have been staring at on the horizon for some time: the depletion of the Social Security trust fund. The latest estimated date for depletion of the Old Age Trust Fund is 2033, although the job destruction in H.R. 1 and the mass deportations will certainly speed up that date, as fewer people pay less into the fund. But assuming the 2033 depletion date holds, the legacy of the bill is that we will be approximately $3.3 trillion more in debt than we would have been. That is $3.3 trillion less to rescue Social Security, keep the promise to America’s workers, and stave off massive benefit cuts to the elderly and disabled. The destruction this bill will have wrought to our budget will become the excuse to abandon senior citizens just eight years from now.
Unnecessary Loss of Life. This bill’s final legacy will be seen in the thousands of avoidable deaths from provisions that would end access to care and repeal recent improvements in our health care system. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Economics, the House bill’s cuts - made only deeper by the Senate - would result in over 42,000
unnecessary and preventable deaths over the next 10 years. While the majority of these tragedies stem from the loss of coverage, Wharton estimates that 13,000 people will die unnecessarily as a result of the bill’s repeal of the 2024 regulation improving nursing home staffing. This estimate doesn’t even begin to consider the tens of thousands of avoidable worker injuries that could be prevented if nursing home staffing improvements were allowed to be implemented.
This is the future that H.R. 1 promises. It is grim. Job losses contribute to lower economic growth, reduce tax revenue that will strain public services, and squeeze Main Streets across the country. A vote for this bill is a vote to send American communities over each of these jobs cliffs, all while cutting holes in the safety net that might otherwise help a family make ends meet. Vote this bill down. It is not too late to prioritize what the working people of this country want: a good job and being able to afford life, not tax cuts for the rich.
Thank you for your attention to this gravely important matter.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth H. Shuler
President
EHS/JC/mb