Photo by Gregory Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

On July 4th, in the towns and counties of rural western Wisconsin, there were celebrations like on any other Independence Day: grilling bratwurst, drinking Leinenkugel’s, fireworks showering high in the summer night. 

That very same day, a thousand miles away in Washington, DC, HR1— also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) — was signed into law. Yet for people here, the passage of the bill was a mere blip in the national headlines. It was not apparent that it would become an economic earthquake, triggering a tsunami of devastating after-effects soon to crash down on our rural communities.

The massive tax cut and spending bill is the most dramatic restructuring of federal budget priorities in six decades. The president called the OBBBA his “greatest victory” and the “most popular bill ever signed.” The White House issued only a scant 237-word press release summarizing the 900-page law; the substance of the law itself was barely mentioned. When it was enacted, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they knew “little or nothing” about what was in the bill.

When asked about his support of the bill, my own representative from Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, Derrick Van Orden, dismissed any suggestion that the White House had influenced his vote. “The president of the United States didn’t give us an assignment. We’re not a bunch of little bitches around here, OK? I’m a member of Congress, I represent almost 800,000 Wisconsinites.” 

The OBBBA permanently extends the 2017 tax cuts and locks in a historic upward transfer of wealth. The top 1% of households receive an average tax cut of $66,000. Working families earning $53,000 or less get a tax cut of just $325. Roughly $1 trillion dollars will flow to the richest households over the next decade, while Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and health coverage are drastically scaled back, pushing 15 million people off insurance. 

‘I want to be part of a strategy, something that’s actually effective’

Last August, 70 of us gathered on a Saturday in Woodville, Wisconsin, population 1,400, with the understanding that something consequential was happening in our nation, yet struggling to figure out how we can respond. We filled a community center on Main Street for six hours: teachers, farmers, retirees, retail workers, students, small business owners. People brought notebooks and coffee. The windows were open. Ceiling fans spun slowly overhead. 

“I’m tired of complaining, feeling like a victim, worried about what’s going to happen next,” one of our members put it plainly. “I want to be part of a strategy, something that’s actually effective.”

I organize with Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin (GROWW). Our work has always started from a simple question: How does power move in the places we live? Since the organization began, our focus has been on local issues like housing, agriculture and rural broadband. But, at that meeting in Woodville, we were trying to name what was happening: how the political chaos in our federal government was flowing down to our families, counties, schools, cities, hospitals, town boards. And, most importantly, what we could actually do about it. 

That day in Woodville we made a plan. It did not involve protest or messaging. Our organizing has never been about reacting the fastest or shouting the loudest. Power is built methodically: identifying who makes decisions, who feels the consequences, and where solidarity can be established and strengthened before a harm is normalized and written off as inevitable. That is why we started with listening.

During the following three months we sat down face to face with nearly 100 local leaders across four counties. We met in offices, conference rooms and coffee shops. We spoke with school superintendents, sheriffs, county administrators, hospital executives, clergy, elected officials, business owners. We asked the same questions over and over: what were people experiencing in their jobs, what pressures were they under, what was keeping them up at night?

Many people we spoke with were overwhelmed by the effort required to stay focused on their jobs: the to-do lists, budgets, hiring, planning. One program director told us her job was mostly “putting out fires.” When we asked how they were reacting to federal policy changes, most people didn’t have much to say. Unless it was affecting them today, they didn’t have the luxury to worry about it. 

Each conversation made clear how county governments in rural Wisconsin are lifelines, not faceless bureaucracies. They plow snow, run elections, maintain roads, administer BadgerCare and SNAP, respond to mental health crises, operate nursing homes, and answer 911 calls. And they are already stretched thin.

Funding was the issue mentioned the most. A county administrator walked us through the elaborate gymnastics required to balance a county budget under state-imposed levy limits that make raising revenue nearly impossible: wheel taxes, bond sales, consolidating services. One-time fixes layered on top of structural gaps. Again, it came back to resources. Not culture wars, not ideology. Money.

Delaying the pain

What surprised us most was what we did not hear. Despite anxiety about shrinking budgets, very few people mentioned the One Big Beautiful Bill. It had not yet made a mark on their daily work. That is not accidental. The new law is designed to delay the pain, disperse responsibility, and conceal the damage out of public view until it feels inevitable.

We decided to look into the law’s ramifications. We did our own research, and what we learned is that rural and small-town communities in western Wisconsin are in for a slow-motion fiscal disaster, and that regular people will be the ones who pay the price. 

Starting in 2027, the federal government is scheduled to cut its share of SNAP administrative costs in half. In counties like Dunn, that shift could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in new local costs. A smaller administrative budget means fewer staff, which means slower processing, higher error rates, and federal penalties that reduce funding even further. The OBBBA seems designed to trigger countless downward spirals that degrade programs until they can be declared broken.

The repercussions for Medicaid follow the same pattern. At Golden Age Manor, the beloved county-run nursing home in Amery, where most of the services are Medicaid funded, even modest reimbursement cuts will translate into tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars lost each year. At the same time, more uninsured residents will still need care.

Across our counties, more than 10,000 people rely on ACA Marketplace coverage for their health insurance. Since federal tax credits expired at the end of 2025, families face premium increases averaging around $1,600 a year. Some will pay far more. Many will drop coverage altogether. When they do, costs will shift to county-funded behavioral health systems and other services already operating at the limits of their resources.

One sheriff described what that will look like in practice: “When someone is in a mental health crisis, our deputies already spend hours driving them across the state because there are no beds here,” he said. “If people lose coverage, those crises do not go away. They show up as 911 calls.”

We must act before the tsunami arrives

A tsunami is set in motion by a distant earthquake that no one feels. Life happens on shore while energy gathers fiercely far out at sea. Only a seismograph sounds the alarm. Once the wave arrives, entire cities are engulfed, communities washed out to sea. Trump’s massive tax cut and spending law was that earthquake. We have decided to act before the wave arrives.

Local governments will be forced to navigate what policy expert Eric Schnurer described as “fiscal and operational crises,” but few people will be able to connect what happens to a bill passed last year. “Most Americans don’t realize how dramatically state and local governments — which most directly affect their daily lives — are about to change.”

County budget hearings were held in November. They often happen with no public comment, gaveled in and gaveled out in a matter of minutes. Last year we showed up and filled the rooms. We brought letters we had drafted, breaking down projected budget impacts county by county. We delivered testimony from the podium. Our goal was not to blame our county leaders, but to signal our alignment with them. 

After one hearing, a county administrator, a self-identified fiscal conservative, met with us and said, “Every point you raised in your letter was correct. Our county government has to brace for what’s coming, and you made that clear to everyone in the room.”

The people who will be hit hardest

We know our county boards are not responsible for causing this disaster, yet they will be forced to deal with it, while we, the residents, will be the ones who feel the cuts most deeply. Our members of Congress who voted “yes” for this bill are the ones responsible for this mess. 

Letters and testimony are not enough. What we need is power. For regular people like us, there is but one path to power: organizing. That means we have to talk to those who will be most affected, inviting them to see their personal stake in this fight. The single parent in River Falls, juggling two part-time jobs and relying on SNAP to keep food on the table. The kid with asthma in Boyceville, whose parents rely on ACA coverage, now at risk of losing access to care. The retired farmer outside Balsam Lake, whose wife’s long-term care at Golden Age Manor nursing home is covered through Medicaid. 

Our long game is to begin the conversation about what it will take for Congress to repeal the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The path to repeal will be fraught with political roadblocks and fiercely opposed by the corporate class, which has been true for every consequential victory working people have ever won in this country. Repealing the law must become a defining issue in every political conversation in America – at dinner tables, at bus stops, and on Reddit threads – starting now and continuing until the law is gone. 

Cracks are already beginning to form. Earlier this month, Rep. Van Orden, along with 17 other Republicans in the House of Representatives, backpedaled on his support of the OBBBA by voting to extend ACA tax credits (more than 30,000 people are expected to lose health insurance in Van Orden’s district). However, the opposition stiffens. Shortly after the vote, in a disciplinary move, Americans For Prosperity announced it was pausing support for those who defected.

Cutting services, expanding the machinery of repression

As I write, immigration agents are spilling into western Wisconsin from Minneapolis, swarming small towns and rural communities across the region. They are driving unmarked vehicles with out-of-state plates. Some members of our organization have built rapid response networks in solidarity with immigrant-led groups. Meanwhile, our neighbors are being terrorized, taken from their homes, and families are being ripped apart. Some local Mexican restaurants and grocery stores have closed their doors. Just sixty miles west, in Minneapolis, two American citizens have been killed by ICE agents. 

This is not a coincidence. While showering billionaires with tax benefits, the OBBBA also massively expands the machinery of repression. It quadrupled the budget of ICE, expanding its force by 10,000 agents and thereby transforming the agency into one larger than most national militaries. On one hand, the administration subjects us to the cruel spectacle of paramilitary raids, disappearances and death. On the other, the administration dismantles the social safety nets that keep people alive, then redistributes public resources to the wealthiest few. A loud disruptive culture war creates a smokescreen for a quiet methodical class war. 

The fight for Congress to repeal the OBBBA will be a David versus Goliath fight. It is a fight about whether the super-rich will be able to bleed us dry and starve our local institutions. Whether our neighbors will die as wealth is extracted from above. Whether daily life for a majority of Americans will be defined by relentless top-down class war. 

This fight will not be won by politicians, consultants, or pollsters. It will be won by regular people who have decided to build a movement town by town, county by county, state by state. The ramifications of the OBBBA are so wide and deep that a new political coalition will be necessary, one big enough to include anyone who isn’t a billionaire. Republicans, Democrats, independents, libertarians, socialists, and people who’ve lost faith in politics altogether. White people, brown people, Black people, young people, old people. The poor, the working class, the middle class. 

An unwavering commitment to big tent politics and multiracial solidarity is how we defeat the divide-and-conquer tactics this administration relies upon. Building trust and power across differences. Not reinforcing divides through purity tests or theoretical debate. Listening for common ground and shared humanity. Seeing every person as a potential ally, not an enemy to defeat. We must organize, strategize and mobilize until regular Americans have won the freedom to make ends meet, live with dignity, and have a voice in the decisions that affect us.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

SUBSCRIBE