
Passage of Big Beautiful Bill is devastating blow to working class, huge win for private equity
July 3, 2025
Today, Congress passed the Republican budget bill in a devastating blow to millions of working class Americans and a huge win for the private equity industry and its billionaire backers.
The passage of this bill represents a major win for the private equity and presents lucrative opportunities for private equity across the many sectors in which the industry is invested, from healthcare to housing.
Instead of meaningful housing reform, the Big Beautiful Bill enshrines the Opportunity Zone tax incentive, an opaque and relatively untested initiative that is enriching the already-wealthy even further and potentially promoting the displacement of the low income communities it purports to serve.
This bill will devastate our healthcare system – an industry already stressed by private equity looting – by slashing Medicaid funding, putting struggling rural hospitals on the brink of closure and leaving entire communities without access to essential care. These cuts will also hit people with disabilities especially hard, stripping away the Home and Community Based Services they depend on to live independently and with dignity.
Already we have seen private equity firms choose to keep open dirty, dangerous coal plants in response to the Trump administration’s extremist climate denial, and this bill stands to encourage the industry to invest further in fossil fuels. By slashing and eventually eliminating clean energy tax credits for solar, wind, and batteries—provisions that have driven innovation and job growth under the Inflation Reduction Act—this bill will set our country back, threaten millions of good-paying jobs currently supporting the energy transition, and put both our planet and our economic future at risk for generations to come.
With the bill’s massive increase in funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), private equity firms stand to profit even further from terrorizing, detaining, and surveilling immigrant communities.
Perhaps the most galling private equity subsidy instituted by this bill is the $70 billion tax break for private equity firms to load their portfolio companies with unmanageable amounts of debt, a tactic that has spelled ruin for safety-net hospital systems and massive companies like Joann and Red Lobster. While private equity billionaires get off scot-free in the aftermath of such enormous bankruptcies, workers, patients, and communities are left holding the bag. Rather than holding private equity firms accountable for looting American businesses and destroying jobs, the bill rewards private equity firms for putting companies and jobs at risk.
While we condemn this massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich, putting the working class at risk while enriching private equity billionaires even further, our resolve has never been stronger. The Private Equity Stakeholder Project will continue the fight for transparency and accountability in this industry, even if our government won’t.
