Dear Senator Moran,
It’s me again, writing another of the no doubt thousands of letters and e-mails and texts that you’ve received over the past month, ever since the House of Representatives approved — by a one-vote margin — President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That bill is coming to the floor of the Senate perhaps as soon as Thursday. So this column is almost certainly too late to influence whatever decisions you and your fellow senators will make. But for the sake of the people of Kansas, I’ll reiterate a few points, just for the record.
First, some praise. The Senate version of the bill gets rid of the House version’s cuts to PELL grant eligibility, as well as its ill-conceived “risk sharing” plan, which would have made colleges and universities responsible for unpaid student loans, a measure that could devastate Kansas’s 21 independent (and mostly religious) institutions of higher education.
So that’s good! (Though it’s worth noting that the Senate’s idea of restricting PLUS loans — Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students — for graduate school and perhaps simply prohibiting students seeking degrees in “low-earning” programs from obtaining any federal student loans at all reflects a STEM bias that could, over time, disrupt music, arts, and humanities education throughout the state.)
Beyond higher education, there is much else for Kansans to worry about.
Kansas has over 300 hospitals and clinics serving rural populations, many of which depend heavily upon Medicaid.
The Senate version of the bill caps the ability of states like Kansas to tax various providers (such as health care businesses and managed care organizations), which might end up costing Kansas close to $4 billion in Medicaid funding, which could likely mean over 10,000 Kansans losing coverage and the rate of rural hospital closures increasing further.
Voting for this would not only be bad policy, but considering the support Medicaid enjoys in the state of Kansas (more than 70% of all Kansans support Medicaid expansion), it would be undemocratic.
There are over 175,000 veterans living in Kansas, with over 30,000 of them struggling with homelessness, and hundreds who currently receive housing assistance through the Veterans Administration.
The House version of Trump’s OBBB cuts over $33 billion in housing assistance.
The VA has already been forced to end its Servicing Purchase program, which provided mortgage relief to tens of thousands of veterans.If the Senate version doesn’t change this policy, and the bill passes, hundreds of Kansas veterans will suffer.
Kansas is a leader in renewable energy; over 40% of the electricity generated here comes from wind, creating an energy market that has attracted over $11 billion in investment over the past decade.
The House version of the bill includes deep cuts to the tax supports and rebates that renewable energy industries and consumers receive, which have enabled them to thrive. The Senate version delays the rollout of some of those cuts, but ought to get rid of them entirely.
There is more I could mention, some of which isn’t in the One Big Beautiful Bill but is tagging alongside, including eliminating funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting.
I recognize that as a conservative Republican you likely have a very different perspective on some of these matters than I.
