It's going to take months, if not years, to figure out how much President for Life Donald Trump and his bitch Congress have fucked us with the Bullshit Bastard Bill. Top of the list is, of course, the vast expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, filled with pissy, armed incels kidnapping people and guarding concentration camps. Some of the worst shit, like the Medicaid work requirements that are so dumb and unnecessary that it will destroy the program, won't take effect until 2027, after the midterm elections because, you know, Republicans count on people not giving a shit until they can't get cancer treatment. While that will lead to unnecessary loss of life, it is something that can be restored, although it'll cause some long-term damage to the health care system of the country, especially in rural areas.
The Barfy Bollocks Bill also contains some things that are pretty much guaranteed to permanently scar our futures on the only planet we have and thus will fuck us forever. We will never escape the effects of the depraved defunding of any effort at all to mitigate the climate crisis. Trump and the savage fucknuts in the House and Senate are not just behaving as if every other day doesn't bring another climate catastrophe. They are actively making it worse, as sure as the methane from Trump's Big Mac farts do.
Much of the damage is done by cutting the funding that had been appropriated under President Joe Biden, in an action called "rescission." And many items in the bill are just rescissions that seem benign until you dive into the details a bit.
So, for instance, the bill calls for "Rescission of amounts for forestry," which says, "The unobligated balances of amounts appropriated [in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022] are rescinded," with the sections listed. If you go to the IRA and look at that section, you can see exactly what Trump and the little bitches are rescinding. It includes "$50,000,000 for the protection of old-growth forests on National Forest System land," as well as $400 million in grants to help farmers and others mitigate the risk of fires and $100 million in administrative costs. Why is this money still available? Because Biden's bill said the funds are "to remain available until September 30, 2031" and so it could be pulled. Biden should have just flooded the country with the funding, but now it's gone.
In this abomination of a bill, when you get to Title VI: Committee on Environment and Public Works, you see this shit:
Take just one of those: "Rescission of funding to address air pollution." That says, "The unobligated balances of amounts made available to carry out section 60401 of Public Law 117–169 (136 Stat. 2079) are rescinded." Public Law 117-169 is the IRA. Section 60401 appropriated $32.5 million for "to support data collection efforts relating to (A) disproportionate negative environmental harms and climate impacts; and (B) cumulative impacts of pollution and temperature rise." Also, it would "establish, expand, and maintain efforts to track disproportionate burdens and cumulative impacts and provide academic and workforce support for analytics and informatics infrastructure and data collection systems." And it would make sure that data is available to members of the communities affected. But that is too woke because it acknowledges that pollution does cause bad shit to happen. However, if we pretend it doesn't, then, I guess, magically it won't. That always works out well. Every single thing in that list is something that was trying to unfuck us and give the planet a future. But I guess if I were a cruel, unhealthy asshole who has been living on borrowed time for at least five years, I wouldn't give a shit, either.
It just goes on, all these little details in the bill that we won't even understand until we wake up in a scorched or flooded hellscape, but at least we won't be wondering how this happened.
Some of it is just confoundingly dickish. Like, shit that was meant to create jobs, which Trump could totally have taken credit for, was cut. "Section 50142 of Public Law 117–169," the Brutal Bunghole Bill says, "is repealed and the unobligated balance of amounts made available under that section is rescinded." That's the section of the IRA for Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing, including, "funds appropriated by this section may be used for the costs of providing direct loans for reequipping, expanding, or establishing a manufacturing facility in the United States to produce, or for engineering integration performed in the United States of, advanced technology vehicles." Why was it just shitcanned? Because the funds can be used "only if such advanced technology vehicles emit, under any possible operational mode or condition, low or zero exhaust emissions of greenhouse gases."
See? By wholesale repealing it, you can make the libs cry, give a gift to auto manufacturers, and ruin the earth. Was anything added in the bill to encourage advanced technology vehicle manufacturing? Fuck you. You know it wasn't because those are electric vehicles and only pussies drive things that don't burn fresh, tasty fossil fuel.
And it just keeps going. Here's another section:
That's all under a header "Termination of Green New Deal subsidies." Except the Green New Deal was never passed. So Republicans are just pretending it was to get the blood of the ignorant all angered up, probably at AOC. Most of what's here just moves the date funds must be spent from 2032 to September of this year, thus disincentivizing the extra expense of some of these efforts at clean energy for the home and vehicle.
And here's the deal: It would be one thing if they were doing all this destructive shit and saying, "Well, that's how we're funding our terrorist police force." Then you could point to a reason and think, "Hey, it's a totally fucked-up and evil thing to do, but at least it makes some skewed logical sense." But the Bonkers Boneheaded Bill is such a boondoggle of debt due to tax cuts and cruel spending, to the tune of several trillion dollars added to the deficit, that all of the money in these efforts could have been left untouched and it wouldn't have mattered more than a tiny bit to the overall cost of the fucking thing.
They're doing it because, like most evil motherfuckers, they just like doing evil shit. We made them feel bad about the climate crisis for a couple of years so now they're taking their revenge on everyone, especially generations yet to come.
We won't understand what harm this viperous, villainous Congress, vacant of anything approaching morality or empathy, has really done for a long time. There's so much fuckery in the details buried in the bill that it will all need to be parsed and interpreted and litigated. But one thing is for sure: they have fucked us. We need to get our spiked dildos of justice ready to fuck them back.