Day 1: The Big Bullshit Bill : Surviving H.R. 1
A Daily Breakdown of the GOP’s War on the Poor
Every day, I’m going to break down a different part of H.R. 1—the bill I refuse to call beautiful because the only B word that it is, starts with Bull and ends with Shit. They think they can starve us with smiles, slogans, dancing to YMCA and outright fucking lies. They think rural working-class people won’t fight back.
So I read every damn page, every section, every single word of it. Do you think your Senator and Congressperson did that?
This isn’t some debate over fiscal policy. This is survival in a place where poverty is real, resources are scarce, and help is already too damn hard to come by. I’m not a think tank. I’m a father in Johnston County with three kids and a constant barrage of bills. Medicaid saved my life and has kept me alive. SNAP keeps food on my kids’ plates and raised me throughout my entire childhood.
This bill that Trump demanded Republicans have it ready for him to sign on the 249th birthday of our nation, cheered on by my own Congressman, Brad Knott is trying to rip all of that away from me, from my neighbors, and from tens of thousands across this state.
This series is for every working class person in North Carolina being fed lies about “progressive tax cuts” while their benefits vanish. For every Food Lion and local stand about to lose thousands in SNAP spending. For every rural clinic already short-staffed and underfunded. For every neighbor in Benson, Four Oaks, Dunn, or Yanceyville who’s one missed form or doctor’s note away from losing everything.
H.R. 1 is not just bad policy. It’s class warfare, written in legalese and it’s coming straight for us.
Am I Supposed to Die for My Kids to Eat?
Let’s get one thing straight before we talk about policy. I am not some abstract number on a budget spreadsheet. I am a father, a working-class Southerner with three hernias in my gut, a history of blood pressure so high the anesthesiologist called it a death sentence, and no paycheck big enough to fix any of it. The doctor said my hernia couldn't be touched until my blood pressure was under control.
That’s the catch, though. My blood pressure danced in the 180s over 150s for years. I didn’t even know until I was approved for Medicaid before my 6 year old son was born and I tried to quit smoking by using Chantix. Now, I am over six years smoke-free but damn near dead in the process. The nurse looked at my numbers back then and said, "You shouldn't be walking around. This is stroke territory."
Now imagine being told not to lift more than five pounds. Imagine the doctor warning you that anesthesia might kill you because your blood pressure is too high. I finally got a referral for surgery, but you can’t afford to stop working because your kids still have to eat.
I am facing foreclosure, I am rationing meds because even the $4 co-pay per prescription can’t be afforded. Until recently I was still climbing ladders and carrying drywall praying my damn intestines don’t rip open before the caseworker calls back. That’s why there are three hernias now instead of the one I started with. That’s what these cuts mean in the real world. They don’t just make us poor, they keep us there, and then punish us for not dying faster.
That’s where I am. Self-employed, medically wrecked, and one snapped step away from collapse. I’ve applied for job after job outside of the physical labor I used to do, and I’m still standing here in a busted chair, one more rejection letter away from drowning. H.R. 1 is a war declaration, and they came for the poor first.
My Congressman Brad Knott, one of the biggest Trump ass kissers, is constantly groveling about Trump with hopes he can be closer to the colostomy bag and can't stop talking about how great this bill is. What’s beautiful about taking a goddamn butcher cleaver for working class people in Johnston County and everywhere else they pretend doesn’t exist once the cameras shut off.
This isn’t about trimming fat. This is about ripping the muscle and marrow straight from the bones of people trying to survive in Selma, Smithfield, Roxboro, and rural towns too small to trend. They know exactly what they're doing. They know how many of us are on SNAP. They know how many of us can’t afford childcare, or insurance, or groceries that don’t come in a damn box. 216 Republicans voted yes anyway. This isn’t policy it’s a fucking punishment. The cruelty is intentional.
SNAP by the Numbers – Starvation as Strategy
H.R.1 starts with Section 10101, demanding a “reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan.” Since 2021, SNAP definitions included about ninety-five extra bucks per month so families could buy something more than rice and beans with mild seasoning. H.R. 1 yanks that back, telling the USDA to revert to starvation math and pretend food costs aren’t climbing.
Over forty million American households rely on SNAP moment-to-moment, pushing grocery prices against fixed allotments, meaning every penny counts. In North Carolina, 1.4 million residents use SNAP; losing even a fraction of their benefits is the difference between feeding kids or letting them go hungry.
In Johnston County alone, where roughly twenty-nine thousand households depend on SNAP, that cut translates into millions lost at local grocers, farmers markets, and convenience stores. The dollar math’s brutal. SNAP benefit loss in Johnston: about $24 million/year. Medicaid drop: another $10–20 million/year spent locally now evaporated. That’s staff layoffs, clinic closures, more ER trips, and frozen local economies
Then Section 10102 follows with the work requirements. What used to apply to people aged 18 to 49 is now extended to 55 if they don’t have dependents. They removed nearly every exemption. Miss a single shift, miss one doctor’s note, forget to upload a form and the system boots you in the teeth and cuts your benefits like you never mattered in the first place..
Projected to slash two to three million SNAP and Medicaid cases nationally and according to Jay Ludlam, Deputy Secretary for the state’s Medicaid program, nearly 255,000 people in North Carolina could lose access to SNAP under the expanded rules. Those bureaucratic landmines are not catching slackers, they're ensnaring people who already work fifty-hour weeks even if the job is field work in Benson or shift-swaps at a poultry plant in Siler City.
They call this “modernizing” the program. What it really does is criminalize survival. It’s the cruelest form of Republican fantasy, the idea that poverty is laziness in disguise.
Section 10103 kicks you again, targeting utility deductions. You get HEAP or LIHEAP to help with heating or cooling. In return, your SNAP deduction for energy shrinks thanks to a yearly cap reset. That means families in places like Eastern NC, who brace for sweltering humid summers with overworked window unit AC’s or in Boone bundling up for brutal winters with no central heat, effectively get punished for just trying to stay alive..
Right after that, Section 10104 says forget about deducting internet costs. School’s out of reach when Wi-Fi counts against your food calculations. If you’re in Four Oaks or Princeton using your neighbor’s hotspot to do homework or apply for jobs, that’s just money lost from the SNAP card.
Then Section 10105 plants a time bomb. The federal government will allow states to offload up to twenty-five percent of expanded program costs onto counties. The paperwork grows; the dollars don’t. Rural counties with already thin budgets will react not by raising money, because they can’t, but by cutting eligibility. That’s slow genocide by red tape.
Section 10106 is next, slashing SNAP admin funding from fifty percent down to twenty-five by 2027. NACo data show counties may have to pick up eight hundred million dollars annually to keep the system functional. In Johnston County, that’s hundreds of thousands in new local taxes or line-item cuts, roads, school nurses, mental health help, parks, all on the chopping block.
Section 10107 comes after, and while its language is cheerfully titled “national education and obesity prevention grant program,” it's a blank cut. They remove funding for community cooking classes and healthy eating programs. Nutrition education programs have helped fight both hunger and disease in rural areas and church kitchens coast-to-coast. Take them away and you take away the future for kids in underfunded schools.
Lastly, Section 10108 slams “alien SNAP eligibility” shut. Legal residents, refugees, DACA recipients, mixed-status families, get thrown off assistance. Twenty-five thousand kids in North Carolina live in mixed-status homes. These are people here LEGALLY. One moment they’re on EBT. The next the card is cut. That’s state level racist cruelty baked into federal law.
North Carolina is facing a tornado of loss. Seventy-one thousand people are on the brink of losing SNAP. Two to three million nationally is a grim forecast, but in smaller counties, that could mean hundreds, even thousands, shut out of food and help. Medicaid losses are projected in the hundreds of thousands here. Rural DSS offices buckle; county budgets bleed; whole families go without care. In Johnston County almost 20% of the residents use Medicaid and up to eleven thousand might be stripped from coverage.
Here’s a real North Carolina voice:
“We’re definitely planning for the worst… At some point we can’t accommodate everything,” said Melissa Beard of a Chatham County food pantry, facing lines that never shrink (NorthCarolinaHealthNews.org, June 5, 2025).
Rural spots like Yanceyville, Roxboro, Harnett and Caswell are already food deserts. Caswell has 12.8 percent food insecurity—and that’s before H.R. 1 launches its cuts (Food Bank CENC, 2023).
Here in District 13, where I live, Brad Knott’s district holds about eighty thousand SNAP recipients and 180,000 Medicaid enrollees. If twenty percent of SNAP recipients lose access, that’s sixteen thousand families. Fifteen percent Medicaid loss translates to nearly twenty-seven thousand adults.
They’re not numbers, they’re neighbors, church-goers, coaches, bus drivers. SNAP cuts here cost twenty-four million a year in local stores; Medicaid cuts could cost ten to twenty million in reimbursements money that pays for clinic staff, emergency rooms, even difficult to afford medical equipment in rural medical facilities.
Local farmers and food distributors echo those fears. Courtney Wilson, a sixth-generation grower in the Piedmont, notes that SNAP and its farmer-market match (Double Bucks) are vital to market sales.
“SNAP, and the double bucks programs are mostly used at farmers markets, and they're mostly used at food stands," she explained. "So if that dollar is not being generated, they're not going to be able to support it, which, in the bottom line, hurts the revenue of the farmer.”
Every clause, 10101 through 10108 pulls the rug from under working families across North Carolina. Brad Knott backed it. Now it's up to counties, churches, teachers, food banks and ourselves to fill the damn gap. If we don’t? These people aren’t abstract anymore. We’ll know them by name, they will be your neighbors.
Donald Trump signed H.R. 1 into law on what should now be known as the 1% day, cementing the most aggressive rollback of anti-poverty programs in decades. This isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s happening. Provisions gutting SNAP, slashing Medicaid, and burdening rural counties are now codified into law.
Implementation mostly begins in 2026, with some damage hitting even sooner as states prepare to enforce new eligibility rules. That means by fall, thousands of families in Johnston County alone could lose food assistance, medical coverage, or both, because 216 afraid of the wrath of Donald Trump voted yes. This is not about budgets. It’s about blame. It’s about stripping the working class to fund permanent tax cuts for the rich.
H.R. 1 isn’t just cruel, it’s historic. This law completes the largest upward transfer of wealth in modern American history, locking in and expanding Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which gave 83% of their benefits to the top 1% while leaving the bottom 60% with scraps.
According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest Americans now stand to gain over $66,000 per year from these changes, while poor and working class families get almost nothing. Meanwhile, services they depend on food assistance, Medicaid, heating help, and local clinics are being gutted to pay for it.
Which means people like me and probably like you too will have a huge net loss. This isn’t economic policy. It’s a looting operation. It takes food from our kids to fund private jets, giant yachts and stock buybacks. 216 Republicans, including Brad Knott voted yes. That’s not representation, it’s a fucking betrayal.