Hildreth Institute in WBUR

How Trump’s big law impacts Massachusetts

This article originally appeared in WBUR.

The massive tax and domestic policy bill passed by Congressional Republicans and signed by President Trump this month expands tax cuts, limits Medicaid and food assistance programs, balloons immigration enforcement spending, and adds trillions to the national debt.

The WBUR newsroom took a look at how some key provisions may affect residents and programs in Massachusetts.

Here’s an initial look at some of the expected impacts:

Health care coverage

One of the biggest impacts of the new law is a $1 trillion cut in federal health care spending. It’s expected to result in nearly 12 million people losing health insurance coverage nationwide by 2034, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Amy Rosenthal, executive director of the Massachusetts nonprofit Health Care for All, called the law’s effect on health care “unethical.”

“This bill makes the largest cuts to Medicaid in the program’s history and attempts a back door repeal of the Affordable Care Act,” she said in a statement.

Republicans say easier access to health insurance during the Obama and Biden administrations resulted in higher costs and more fraud.

Under the new law, many Medicaid recipients, including in Massachusetts, will have to prove they meet a new work requirement at least twice a year, likely starting before 2027. NPR’s health reporters broke down what you need to know about this and other provisions here.

Massachusetts health officials estimate that up to 300,000 residents currently insured through MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, or the state health insurance marketplace could lose coverage. Public health experts worry that many eligible residents will fall through the cracks because they fail to provide all the necessary paperwork.

Hospital leaders have warned that lower insured rates will have a ripple effect on the health care system, especially for small hospitals and community health centers. State estimates suggest the law will cost Massachusetts up to $3.5 billion a year in federal health care funding once fully implemented.

According to Michael Curry, CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, about 31% of revenue for community health centers comes from Medicaid reimbursements. While not all of that would go away, Curry said the new law will be “devastating.”

Public health experts argue the cost of health care is lower for everyone if more people get preventive care rather than waiting for a health crisis.

“If we don't invest up front, we pay for it later — when our emergency rooms are packed, when people come in, sicker, more acute in their care, and quite frankly, [when] they can't work and can't serve in the jobs that we need them in,” Curry said.

Baystate Health, the largest health care system in western Massachusetts, projects a loss of $30 to $50 million a year due to federal Medicaid cuts, according a statement from the system's chief financial officer, Laurie Martin. The system has an annual budget of $3 billion and operates five hospitals.

In this 2014 file photo, Planned Parenthood is seen on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

An additional provision of the law bans Medicaid payments to some nonprofit health care groups that offer abortions.

Medicaid dollars already cannot be used for abortions except in certain circumstances, but could be used for other types of care, such as cancer screenings and birth control.

Just days after Trump signed the bill into law, Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston challenging the provision.

Nationwide, Planned Parenthood estimates about 1 million of its patients use Medicaid. In Massachusetts, about 40% of Planned Parenthood’s 30,000 annual patients have MassHealth, according to  Dr. Luu Ireland, the local organization’s chief medical officer. The Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts joined the federal lawsuit.

“The Trump administration’s hell-bent ambitions to close our clinics and abandon our patients won’t stop us. Let me be crystal clear: We are not intimidated. We were built for this moment,” said Dominique Lee, president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. “We will never be bullied into turning our backs on health care or human rights.”

A federal judge temporarily blocked the government from implementing this provision of the law.

— Amy Gorel

Food assistance

The law enacts major changes to the food assistance program that shift costs onto states and require more people to work to be eligible for benefits.

The bill has several major changes that could impact Massachusetts:

First, it expands a work requirement for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Adults who are homeless, veterans and former foster youth are no longer exempted from the requirement. “Able-bodied adults” up to age 64, including parents and caregivers with kids older than 14, must also meet the work requirements.

Immigrants must have lawful permanent residency status to receive benefits. Previously, refugees or immigrants with temporary protected status or other legal status were eligible for SNAP.

In Massachusetts, more than a million people — or 1 in 6 residents — are enrolled in SNAP. The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI), which advocates for low-income communities, estimates that as many as 175,000 state residents could lose some or all of their benefits.

Second, the bill increases how much Massachusetts will have to pay to administer the program. Starting in October 2026, Massachusetts will be on the hook for three quarters of the program’s administration costs, including training and paying SNAP case workers, and ensuring benefits are paid accurately and on time. Previously the state and federal government split the cost 50-50. The Mass. Law Reform Institute estimates this will cost the state at least an additional $53 million each year.

Third, the bill requires some states to pay for a share of benefits if their “payment error rate” exceeds 6%. The rate is calculated based on how often a state over or under pays benefits to participants.

But the error rate isn’t a measure of fraud, according to the law reform institute. The vast majority comes from unintentional mistakes by workers or clients.

In fiscal 2024, Massachusetts’ payment error rate was 14%, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. If the error rate stays the same, Massachusetts could be on the hook for nearly $400 million in 2027.

“This Act shifts responsibility of paying for food and health care programs onto individual states—a burden that no state budget will be able to absorb without significant trade-offs to other critical state-funded social needs programs,” Catherine D’Amato, executive director of the Greater Boston Food Bank, wrote in a statement.

All these changes create more bureaucratic hurdles for those who get SNAP, according to Vicky Negus, senior economic justice advocate for the institute. And other changes make it harder for the state to effectively administer the program — a perfect storm, she said, with big implications.

“The state is going to cut people off who should not get cut off.” Negus said. “That will happen.”

Food advocates said they’re worried the bill will put more pressure on an already stressed emergency food system. The Greater Boston Food Bank estimates the state’s emergency food system would need over $100 million annually to support this growing need, if the institute’s estimates are correct.

“ I just wanna be very clear, the responsibility of the harms of this package are on the president and are on Congressional Republicans,” Negus said. “However, [along with] our governor and our legislative leaders, we stand ready with them to mitigate the most immediate consequences.”

— Amanda Beland

Bolstering immigration enforcement

Congress allocated more than $150 billion to enable Trump’s mass deportation promise, with massive infusions for new federal agents, the construction of a border wall and more immigrant detention capacity.

Immigration enforcement has already ramped up under Trump’s administration, and advocates for immigrants in Massachusetts are bracing for what’s in store.

“What we're seeing now is terrible — but it's only going to get a lot worse,” said immigration historian Avi Chomsky of Salem State University. “It's like every other aspect of the federal government is getting cut," except for the Department of Homeland Security.

ICE could add 10,000 new agents with the expanded funding, according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. The law also allocates $45 billion for the detention of immigrants — that’s roughly five times the annual budget of the federal prison system. Noem said it will pay for 80,000 new ICE beds and allow for an average daily population of 100,000 detainees.

In Massachusetts, the only detention facility for ICE detainees is the Plymouth House of Corrections. County jails in Dartmouth and Boston had once been used, but no longer have contracts with ICE.

Shortages of beds locally could partially explain why the agency has housed people at an administrative building in Burlington and transferred people to other parts of the country. Immigration lawyers said the transfers make it harder to defend their clients. But Chomsky said it’s hard to imagine more detention capacity being added in Massachusetts instead of in Republican-controlled states.

“My guess is that they're more interested in increasing detention capacity in places like Louisiana and Texas, where there's more popular support, less resistance and also more favorable legal structures — both in the immigration courts and in the criminal courts,” she said.

Border czar Tom Homan indicated Monday that new facilities could be sited in red states.

“I would think every red state governor would want to help us do this,” Homan told Fox News.

Homan said blue states won't “step up because they're too busy attacking ICE and they're too busy attacking Trump policies.”

On top of the new funding, Congress implemented a host of new or increased fees for immigration-related procedures.

Jonathan Ng, a Boston-based immigration attorney who also worked as a DHS prosecutor under former President Joe Biden, pointed to a $100 fee that will be attached to asylum applications — plus $100 for every year the application remains pending.

“It almost seems like there is an inherent message behind it that it is saying: ‘Hey, let's make it more difficult,’ “ Ng said.

Immigrants will also have to pay $550 to obtain a work permit and $275 to renew; $250 to apply for special immigrant juvenile status; and $500 to apply for Temporary Protected Status. Among the biggest increases is the fee to appeal an immigration judge's decision, which jumps from $110 to $900.

“ I think it's a policy that encourages the [voluntary departure] of individuals that might otherwise have an avenue for relief,” Ng said.

There were nearly 18,000 asylum applications filed in Massachusetts in 2022, the most recent available data, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

“It's really a plethora of funds" that are going to be dedicated to removals, Ng said. “I think that the fees that are being implemented now are really going to be used to pursue those goals.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

— Simón Rìos and Jesús Marrero Suarez

Upping higher ed taxes

The new legislation also significantly raises the tax burden for top private colleges and universities with large endowments. Under a new tiered tax structure, universities with endowments of more than $2 million per student now have to pay an 8% tax on their endowment income — up from the current 1.4%.

Harvard and MIT — as well as other wealthy private institutions around the country like Yale, Stanford and Princeton — will experience the brunt of this change. Which is what the proposal seemed designed to do. A U.S. House Ways and Means Committee report from May singled out “woke, elite universities that operate more like major corporations” in promoting a higher endowment tax.

“The institutions that are ultimately going to be affected are the ones who’ve been under the microscope,” said Phillip Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College. “I don’t think it’s actually a surprise that it’s been designed that way. It seems like this is mostly about politics.”

Harvard is expected to pay an additional $267 million per year, according to a recent analysis by Levine for The Chronicle of Higher Education. MIT is expected to pay an additional $129 million per year.

Harvard and MIT declined to comment on the new tax.

The extra millions the two Cambridge schools must pay the government come amid a slew of federal funding cuts and canceled federal grants and contracts by the Trump administration. In response, the schools have implemented cost-cutting measures, including staff layoffs, hiring freezes and budgetary rollbacks.

In a June 20 statement, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said the higher endowment tax burden “represents the most serious current threat” to the institution. The net financial impact from the elevated 8% tax rate will be “equivalent” to MIT’s “entire annual undergraduate financial aid budget,” she said, adding those funds sustains aid to roughly 60% of MIT’s undergraduate student body — or 2,600 students per year.

“MIT has turned generations of alumni support into a substantial endowment,” she said. “We use the income from those investments overwhelmingly to support financial aid and research.”

At Harvard, annual endowment distribution in the 2024 fiscal year represented 37% of the institution’s total operating revenue, according to its most recent financial report.

Close to half of endowment spending across higher education institutions is dedicated to financial aid, according to a 2024 study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

And at highly endowed universities, this reserve allows schools to offer lower tuition to many low-to-middle income students, according to Levine.

“When you tax those endowments, you’re taking money away from those students and potentially making it more difficult for them,” he said.

MIT, starting this fall, will offer free tuition for families making under $200,000 a year — a move it said was possible through donations to its $24.6 billion endowment. Harvard earlier this year announced it will be tuition-free for students from households making under $100,000 annually.

“I would imagine those institutions will do everything they can to maintain those policies,” Levine said, adding that in the future financial landscape, “it’s just going to be harder for them to do it.”

Meanwhile, small wealthy private colleges — including Wellesley, Amherst and Williams in Massachusetts — were spared under the new plan. That’s because the legislation includes an exemption for schools enrolling less than 3,000 students.

Under the new tiered structure, universities whose endowments amount to $750,000 and $2 million per student will pay a 4% tax, and universities whose endowments are worth between $500,000 and $750,000 per student will remain taxed at 1.4%.

These changes take effect Jan. 1, 2026.

Before this new package was signed, private colleges and universities enrolling at least 500 tuition-paying students with endowments worth more than $500,000 per student were subject to an across-the-board 1.4% endowment income tax. The endowment tax was first levied during the first Trump term.

— Suevon Lee

Disincentivizing renewable energy

Massachusetts already has some of the highest energy prices in the country, and this new law will almost certainly jack up utility bills even further. While estimates vary, experts say ratepayers in the state could see the cost of electricity rise anywhere from 3-6% over the next five to 10 years.

The reason is fairly simple: At a time when electricity demand is rising, this law makes it harder and more expensive to build renewables like wind and solar. It does this, in large part, by rapidly phasing out commercial tax credits established by the Biden administration. (Under the new law, to qualify for the tax credit, a solar or wind project must start construction by July 4, 2026 or be in operation by the end of 2027.)

While Trump and Congressional Republicans are banking on the growth of fossil fuels like natural gas to fill the gap, the reality is that these industries face supply chain bottlenecks. For instance, a developer who wants to build a new natural gas power plant may have to wait five to seven years for a turbine, and could end up paying up to 2.5 times more for it than they would have a few years ago, according to S&P Global data.

All of this means that Massachusetts, like the country as a whole, is likely to continue building new solar and onshore wind projects to keep the lights on. The electricity they generate, however, will be more expensive.

Offshore wind is a different story. The handful of New England-based projects currently under construction, like Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind, should qualify for the credits. But thanks to a permitting pause instituted by Trump on his first day in office, the region is unlikely to see new offshore wind development anytime soon.

"The [Big Beautiful Bill] is bad, bad, bad for Massachusetts. Bad for ratepayers' wallets, bad for grid reliability, bad for energy independence," wrote Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director at the Acadia Center, a climate advocacy and research group, in an email. "It will be a setback for the clean energy industry and will force Massachusetts to adopt new creative strategies to keep vital public policy goals on track."

Beyond the energy industry, the new law will make it more expensive to put solar panels on homes, buy a new or used electric vehicle and install an electric heat pump — technologies that are better for the climate and can save residents money in the long-run.

The $7,500 federal tax credit for buying an EV expires on Sept. 30, 2025, while all other federal residential energy efficiency and clean energy tax credits expire at the end of the year.

"Our administration is working hard to lower energy costs for people and businesses, but President Trump and Congressional Republicans are taking us backward," said Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper.

One silver lining for residents of the commonwealth: State rebates for EVs, solar panels, heat pumps and other home energy efficiency improvements remain in effect through the MOR-EV and Mass Save programs.

— Miriam Wasser

Sweet and SALT-y

The new law could help high-income and house-rich Bay Staters save thousands when they file their taxes each year, thanks to a change to the federal State and Local Tax Deduction.

The so-called SALT deduction lets taxpayers subtract the amount they paid in local taxes — such as state income taxes and property taxes — from their federally taxable income. The 2017 tax law signed by Trump put a $10,000 cap on the deduction, which previously had no cap. However, the new law lifts the cap to $40,000 for taxpayers making up to $500,000 a year. (For those making more than $500,000, it begins to phase back down to $10,000). The law also gives these changes a 2030 expiration date, at which point the cap reverts back to $10,000 for everyone (unless Congress decides to extend the provisions).

The increased cap is especially meaningful for higher-income, higher-tax states like Massachusetts, which has a 5% state income tax, along with single-family home property tax bills that often average above $15,000 a year in Boston’s wealthier suburbs.

“When SALT was uncapped, it was absolutely an advantage to the commonwealth of Massachusetts, because it meant that we could shift some cost from the state onto the federal government in a way that mitigated impact on taxpayers that we rely on,” said Doug Howgate, the president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

In 2022, the most recent year tax data is available, 12.2% of taxpayers in Massachusetts claimed the SALT deduction. The Bay State also had the fifth-highest average SALT claim, at $8,881, “indicating that a large portion of taxpayers claiming the deduction bumped up against the [previous] $10,000 cap, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Those people tend to be in the higher income echelons. The Congressional Research Service recently estimated that taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 got about two-thirds of the SALT deduction’s tax benefits in 2024, while individuals and couples with incomes under $50,000 (who represent more than half of all taxpayers in the United States) got less than 1%.

With the new cap, those who can take advantage of the full $30,000 increase in the maximum deduction could in theory save as much as $7,000 to $10,000 when they file their taxes.

But your exact savings depend on specific factors, like how much you paid in taxes, your federal income tax rate and whether you itemize deductions.

For example, a single Brookline surgeon making $400,000 a year and with a $20,000 property tax bill could save $10,500 from the higher SALT cap. A married couple in Needham making a combined $300,000 a year with the town’s average single-family property tax bill ($15,523) would save nearly $5,000.

But that’s assuming they were already itemizing their deductions.

The new law also slightly increases the standard deduction to $15,750 for single filers and $31,500 for married couples filing jointly for the coming tax season. For most lower- and middle-income Massachusetts residents, taking the standard deduction will likely still be the most cost-effective route, unless they have a particularly hefty property tax bill.

From a statewide perspective, Howgate said, the increased SALT deduction will help wealthy residents, but not to the same degree as the previously uncapped deduction.

“It’s less bad for Massachusetts than it was at $10,000,” Howgate said.

— Nik DeCosta Klipa

Student loan changes

The newly signed bill will make college less affordable for students – even as the state has taken steps in recent years to do the opposite, according to Massachusetts education officials and experts who spoke with WBUR.

“President Trump's new law makes student loans less available, more expensive and riskier for students,” said Michael Dannenberg, the deputy commissioner for policy at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

The bill caps student loans for individuals at $100,000 for graduate studies and $200,000 for professional studies. It also limits the total amount parents can borrow to send their child to college using the Parent Plus Loan to $65,000.

These changes to the borrowing landscape may make Massachusetts students turn to private loans, a riskier option, to finance their educations or forgo an opportunity altogether.

“We fear that especially for the lower income students, who are already debt averse and do not borrow too much … they are going to be more worried to enroll,” said Bahar Akman Imboden, managing director of the Hildreth Institute, a higher education nonprofit.

The bill also leaves just two paths to repay a loan: a Standard Repayment plan, with a fixed monthly bill; and a Repayment Assistance Plan that links monthly payments to income, but now requires 30 years of on-time payments before loans are forgiven.

The nonprofit Student Borrower Protection Center estimates a typical college graduate will pay $3,000 more per year under the RAP plan than the SAVE plan, a Biden income-based repayment plan which the bill eliminated. Local advocates said they worry this change may discourage low-income students from enrolling in degree-granting programs.

“All that is surely going to factor in how students make those decisions [about attending universities],” Imboden said. “It might push those who are standing to benefit the most from a professional degree or graduate degree to not even go there.”

However, community college advocates say a silver lining of the bill is that Pell Grants will remain largely unchanged for the roughly 120,000 Massachusetts low-income students who rely on that source of financial aid.

The bill also added access to Pell Grants for students enrolled in short-term professional programs.

“We are able to breathe a big sigh of relief in the community college space and honestly across higher education in the commonwealth,” said Nate Mackinnon, the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Community Colleges. “So many of our students rely on the Pell Grant as their means to access higher education.”