Appendix I: Legislation that reaches people

Supports the largest useful legislative program.

Design the bill around delivery

The administration will work with Congress to do as much as it possibly can. The president will call for a genuinely big and beautiful bill to restore all the benefits the Trump administration took away from Americans and to undo all the damage done. If the balking donkeys, the moderate Democrats unwilling to support the full Mission, fight it, the president will take the argument to the country and launch primary campaigns against the leading balkers. The president's mission here is to pass the biggest and most beautiful bill possible.

With the filibuster still in force, the administration will use budget reconciliation for the provisions that qualify. That process allows the Senate to pass certain budget and spending legislation with a simple majority vote. The American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act all passed this way.

Assuming narrow majorities in both chambers, and the balking donkeys limiting what can be done, the bill will focus on affordability, health care, and undoing the damage of the Trump administration. Within those priorities, it will concentrate on mainstream, uncontroversial progressive policies that could readily win at least 51 Senate votes. The key is having a well-crafted plan for the legislation to make a difference in Americans' lives.

Many of the major policy initiatives of the last 50 years have failed to turn their promises into quick, visible improvements. This bill must be designed around implementation from the beginning, with benefits that reach a majority of Americans. Modernizing and streamlining the federal bureaucracy will be a major priority, so that a large bill produces improvements people actually experience.

Reconciliation has limits. The Byrd rule excludes provisions whose budget effects are merely incidental to their nonbudgetary policy and imposes other requirements involving committee jurisdiction, deficits, and Social Security. Benefit-spending and tax changes may qualify; agency operating budgets may need appropriations, and other policy changes may require ordinary legislation or administrative action. The public program should be prepared as a whole without pretending every item fits one parliamentary route. Senate Budget Committee's explanation.

Restore benefits and public capacity

Much of what the Trump administration dismantled can begin to be restored quickly because the programs still exist. The administration will pair restored funding with the staff and operating changes needed for benefits to reach people. The 10 priorities below remain the program, with each provision assigned to the legislative or administrative route it requires.

• Medicaid. Roll back the work requirements and administrative rules limiting eligibility. CBO's February 2026 outlook estimates that the enacted 2025 law's Medicaid changes will increase the number of people without health insurance by 7.5 million in 2034. That is the Medicaid estimate, not the effect of regulations alone or all health-policy changes combined. CBO, Appendix A.
• Food assistance. Eliminate the work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), restore eligibility for lawful immigrants, and cut the new provisions that shift costs away from the federal government and onto states.
• Medicare. Protect the prescription drug subsidies the administration plans to end in 2027, restore access for lawful immigrants, and expand Medicare's ability to negotiate prices for some high-cost medications.
• The Affordable Care Act. Revive the post-pandemic tax credits that expanded eligibility.
• Public health and scientific research funding. Rescind the budget cuts that stripped billions of dollars of funding for scientific research from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Weather forecasting and climate monitoring. Reverse the budget cuts that have drained staff and research funding from the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, giving both the full capacity they need to warn and coordinate with communities threatened by extreme weather.
• Emergency management staffing. Repeal the budget cuts that have left the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) short-staffed and unprepared for the nation's increasingly devastating natural disasters.
• Veterans' health staffing. Roll back the staffing cuts and budget freezes at the Veterans Health Administration that have driven tens of thousands of employees out of the organization and substantially lengthened wait times for veterans seeking the care they were promised.
• National park and public land staffing. Repeal the sweeping budget cuts that have gutted the workforce within the national parks system, and reverse the administration's moves to steer National Park Service (NPS) funding toward Trump's wasteful and foolish attempts to remake the monuments of Washington DC.
• USAID. The agency will be reconstituted and built back better, with less focus on imperialism and more on actual aid and development.

The Medicare proposal retains the source's reference to threatened prescription-drug subsidies in 2027. The particular provision still needs identification before legislative drafting; the plan does not treat that unspecified reference as a verified current-law schedule.

A bipartisan bill, if the votes are there

There are many urgently needed policies that cannot pass inside a budget reconciliation bill, and will need the support of 60 senators to overcome the filibuster. In a situation with slim congressional majorities and balking donkeys holding sway over the process, the president should concentrate on policies that have passed with cross-party support in the recent past, but failed at the level of execution.

The plan's criticism of the bipartisan charging and broadband programs is that members of both parties added restrictions protecting incumbent industries, compromising delivery before work began. To protect the public interest, the president should be willing to veto a bill designed not to work.

The following are some examples of what should be included:

EV charging

Congress put $5 billion toward a national electric vehicle charging network in 2021, and the first NEVI-funded station opened in December 2023, more than two years later.¹ The federal government took 15 months to publish the standards states had to follow, so final requirements were not in place until 2023. Each state then had to run its own program: writing a plan, running a bid process, negotiating with private landowners, and waiting on the electric utility to connect the site.

In this new version of the program the executive branch will take the lead, installing public chargers on federally owned property and publishing standard station designs and contract terms, with the aim that ready sites can start building the week the money arrives. A ready site is one where adequate power already reaches the property line. Sites that need a utility upgrade are governed by the interconnection queue rather than by federal process, which is why the building audit records electrical capacity alongside energy use, and why the interconnection request is filed at the front of the process rather than after the award.² The proposed automatic approval route lets states adopting those designs and terms avoid repeating the same review. The administration will seek the statutory change needed to permit sales at interstate rest areas; a standard design cannot itself repeal the commercial restrictions in highway law. 23 U.S.C. §111.

Rural broadband

The expansion of rural broadband internet ran into similar issues. The planning baseline describes $42.45 billion appropriated, four and a half years elapsed, and construction underway in only eight states. The eight-state count still needs source-year verification; approvals and awards are not the same as construction underway. The amount and the program's stages are documented in NTIA's funding account.

Federal mapping preceded allocations, states faced two rounds of federal approval and provider selection, and incumbent challenges could hold up disputed addresses. The FCC's initial map appeared in November 2022; an updated 2023 map informed allocations. The source's statement that the map was not finished until 2023 conflated those milestones. Washington then required another selection round in 2025 after some states had picked winners. FCC's mapping chronology, NTIA's 2025 restructuring account.

The judgment that almost all delay was federal is the author's explanation of those failures, not a measured allocation of every month's cause. Its blanket description of incumbent challenges having no resolution deadline still needs checking against the rules and period concerned. The proposed remedy is clear.

In this new version of the program the federal government stops making states wait. A provider that claims an address is already served has to prove it with subscriber data and real speeds, on a deadline, and if the clock runs out the address counts as unserved and the money moves. States that have already picked their vendors keep them under the proposed redesign, with any necessary legal changes made to preserve completed selections. There is one round of federal approval with a strict timeline for the decision. And the standard contract terms get written in Washington, so 50 states are not each paying lawyers to invent the same document.

Make government easier to use

Getting a benefit, resolving a Medicaid or healthcare.gov problem, using the DMV, dealing with a child's school, or opening a business should not require navigating a different maze each time. The ambition is to transform those everyday dealings with government rapidly and comprehensively, at every level. Where an administrative or software change can remove a delay overnight, the administration should make it. The bill's service program will replace repeated forms, long waits, and disconnected systems with services people can use to finish the task in front of them.

The plan looks back 13 years to healthcare.gov's disastrous October 2013 launch as the example of a public promise defeated by its own systems. Americans still encounter outdated systems that make routine dealings with government frustrating and slow. For this reason, a key priority of the budget reconciliation bill will be modernizing and streamlining government services. The goal is to make interacting with federal agencies as frictionless as possible.

The same effort can improve the services people encounter through local schools, cities, and other levels of government. A district using one free operations application instead of 10 separate vendors can save money and give families a simpler way to deal with their children’s schools. Cities can use shared tools for permits and inspections. People receiving federal benefits can get payments and claims resolved without the present delays.

Many nations run their digital governance systems at a much higher level of quality than the United States despite having significantly fewer resources. The main model for this program is Estonia, which is often cited as one of the most advanced and well-run digital societies on the planet. Almost every interaction an Estonian has with their government happens online, through a single secure state-issued login that works across every public service.

The administration will revive the United States Digital Service's public-service mission and seek the resources needed for this initiative. The source records about 215 technologists in 2021 and says most technologists were dismissed or resigned within six weeks of the 2025 change; those detailed staffing baselines still need verification. The institutional distinction is established: the January 2025 order renamed USDS and created a temporary organization within it. That organization's July 4, 2026 termination did not terminate every authority of the renamed service. Executive Order 14158.

These are some projects it could build:

• Return-free tax filing. Use the W-2 and 1099 information the IRS receives to send a completed return taxpayers can approve or correct where those records suffice, following the practice already used in other countries. Taxpayers whose records are incomplete can supply the missing information.
• Automatic enrollment in what people already qualify for. Billions go unclaimed every year purely because claiming is difficult, so enroll people automatically in the programs where the government already holds the data to know they qualify: SNAP, Medicaid and CHIP, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and federal student aid.
• Same-day federal payments. Move approved refunds, benefits, and disaster assistance over available instant-payment routes, turning payment waits of weeks into seconds where supported. Faster payment follows an authorized decision; it does not determine eligibility.
• Medicare and Medicaid customer service. Replace the hold times, the fax machines, and the coverage letters nobody can parse with a system that tells a beneficiary what they are covered for in plain language on the first try.
• One front door for all government benefits. One login, one form, and enrollment that carries across programs instead of restarting at each one.
• A free national curriculum and free textbooks. Publicly owned, openly licensed materials for every K–12 subject, built once at federal expense and offered to any state or district that wants them. Adoption remains voluntary. The funding and implementation must respect federal limits on directing curriculum and selecting textbooks. 20 U.S.C. §1232a.
• Veterans' claims processing. A disability claim that now takes months of paper-shaped process becomes software, and the backlog is already measured and published monthly, which makes it the most defensible demonstration available.
• One-stop business registration and free small-business filing. Register once and file once, instead of repeating the same information to a state agency, the IRS, and several federal offices every year.
• One free school operations application. Offer one free application in place of separate purchases. The source illustrates a district paying 10 vendors; calculate and announce each adopting district’s actual saving.
• Free permitting and inspection software for cities. Supports the nationwide retrofit program by removing the permitting delay in front of every local build.
• A federal permitting status page. Every project in one public place, with real dates and the name of the agency holding it up.

These are examples of a larger effort to transform everyday service, not an exhaustive mandatory software list. State and local institutions can adopt the shared tools, and agencies remain responsible for lawful eligibility decisions and usable ways to resolve a problem. The result should be a finished task: insurance obtained, a claim settled, an inspection arranged, or a business registered.

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