Americans Informed About the Distributional Effects of Republicans’ Budget Bill Overwhelmingly Oppose It

Authors:

Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University
Patrick Sullivan, Yale University

Abstract:

Republicans in the Senate are currently considering the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, if enacted, would be the most regressive U.S. tax and budget law in at least the past four decades. How are Americans’ views of the bill affected by information about its regressive effects? We conducted a survey experiment assessing this question in early June 2025. Our control group received no distributional details, whereas two treatment groups received specific estimates of the bill’s distributional effects—either those of the tax cuts alone (treatment group 1) or those of both the tax cuts and spending cuts (treatment group 2). In line with recent non-experimental surveys, baseline opposition to the bill was high, with 2-to-1 opposition. Opposition was much higher, however, in the first treatment group (tax cuts only), and higher still in the second (combined tax and spending cuts). When shown the combined effects, the ratio of opposition to support increased to more than 7 to 1, and only 11% of Americans supported the bill. Among Republicans, the difference across groups was even larger: support and opposition flipped between the control group and the combined treatment group, from nearly 3 to 1 support to nearly 3 to 1 opposition. Our results confirm that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is broadly unpopular. They also show, however, that Americans have not yet learned about the bill’s regressive distributional effects, and those who are informed about these effects overwhelmingly oppose the bill.