The Coming Storm: Reconciliation Bill set to Undermine Montana

Our government should do two things: work for the people and stay out of our personal business.

Right now, this big, bad bill does the opposite. It takes away healthcare while trying to control what happens in our doctor’s offices. It cuts child care and then blames families for struggling. It slashes food aid for kids and elders and calls it “freedom.”

This isn’t freedom. It’s cruelty dressed in a press release.

Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill is a Trojan horse, slick branding on a budget-slashing scheme that will devastate rural states like ours. If passed, this bill will gut Medicaid, eliminate food assistance for the hungry, weaken fire protection, dismantle public health, and put essential services like veterans’ care and rural air travel on the chopping block.

Let me be clear: this bill doesn’t fix the government's spending problem. It hands our taxpayer dollars to profiteers and corporations instead of our hospitals, schools and veterans.

Where is Steve Daines when he should be standing up for Montanans? His silence about what this legislation does to Montana is not neutrality. It’s complicity.

Here’s what’s on the line for Montana:

• Cuts over $300 million to the Essential Air Service program. EAS is a lifeline for towns in Eastern Montana like Glasgow, Wolf Point, and Sidney. No EAS means no flights. That means no medical travel, no economic activity, no connectivity.

• Slashes Medicaid by the billions, including the expansion that’s kept rural hospitals alive and working families and children covered. In Montana, Medicaid supports over 270,000 people, many in towns with just one clinic. Over 120,000 recipients are children and most of these kids have working parents.

• Guts supplemental food assistance, hurting more than one in ten Montanans who use this temporary aid to feed their families, especially kids and elders.

• Defunds wildfire preparedness, including the very interagency systems Montana depends on every summer. This isn’t theoretical. With fewer seasonal firefighters and delayed response times, our homes and forests will be at greater risk.

• Starves the VA and veterans’ health services, while still claiming to “honor our troops.” Stripping benefits is not patriotism.

And the kicker?

• This bill still opens the door to privatizing public land, fast-tracking fossil fuel extraction, and selling off the natural resources that define our state.

I’ve met the people who will be hurt by this bill. I’ve visited clinics in eastern Montana where Medicaid is the only reason the doors stay open. I’ve talked with veterans who rely on that one appointment each month to manage PTSD, or chronic pain, or just to be seen.

Montanans don’t care about slogans. They care about survival. I’m running for U.S. Senate because Montanans deserve someone who will show up, fight back, and tell the truth.

This "big bill" legislation will alter every life in Montana: Republican, Democrat, Libertarian,  Independent, even apolitical. This legislation will affect me, a Democrat and a woman who’s tired of men like Steve Daines deciding what I can do with my body, or anyone else’s.

This one big, bad bill will devastate funding for family heath clinics across Montana. I will fight like hell to make sure this doesn't happen and if it does, work tirelessly to reverse course.

Unlike Daines, I don’t want to go to DC and stay there until I die. I want to go there, do the damn job, and come home.

I’m running because I know we need fewer career politicians and more public servants who understand what's at stake on the ground.

We can’t fight this alone. We need to organize, vote, raise our voices, and push back on both parties when they forget who they serve. We don’t have time to wait for permission. We need Medicaid. We need disaster aid, air travel and veterans’ clinics. We need them now, not after another think tank report or D.C. cocktail party.

This is your call to action. Call Senator Steve Daines at (202) 224-2651. Tell him what you think about this bill. Tell him to do his job and stand up for Montanans.

Let’s build something real. The future of Montana depends on it.