One year after President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, the first-year receipts are complete. SNAP participation is down 4.2 million people — a 10% drop — between enactment and March 2026, driven by expanded work requirements that now cover adults aged 55 through 64 and by the removal of exemptions that had previously protected veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth [2]. Average ACA marketplace premiums rose 58%, from $113 per month in 2025 to $178 per month in 2026, after the OBBBA chose not to extend the enhanced premium tax credits that expired at year's end [1].
Those two numbers are the core of the first-year distribution picture. They are not projections. They are administrative enrollment and premium data.
The paper tracked the SNAP count yesterday, establishing the 4-million figure and the paper's central frame: the Medicaid damage wave, which the law's work-requirement and eligibility changes trigger on a different implementation timeline, is still approximately three months from arriving and will dwarf the food-aid numbers when it does. The new receipts this week add two columns to that distribution picture.
The first addition: ACA plan enrollment fell 5% in the 2026 open-enrollment period — 1.2 million fewer people — the largest single-year enrollment decline since the marketplace opened in 2014 [1]. Average deductibles rose 37% to a record high of $3,786 per person, up from $2,759 in 2025. These are the people who still have coverage. The people who left the marketplace are uninsured; how many are enrolled in Medicaid versus uninsured versus covered through employment depends on state-level data that is still being compiled.
The second addition: the Tax Policy analysis of the OBBBA's corporate-tax provisions finds that $51 billion in tax benefits from the law are concentrated in four companies — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla — through accelerated depreciation and research-and-development expensing provisions [3]. The CBO's distributional analysis, which the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy cites, projects that the bottom income quintile's resources fall 4% by 2033 from the combined SNAP and Medicaid changes, while the top 1% receives a larger net benefit from the OBBBA's tax provisions than the bottom 80% of earners combined.
The law also eliminated the EV tax credit. EV sales are down 22% year-over-year [2]. The administration's public receipts for the OBBBA cite EV sales data as an expected positive effect of unwinding a market subsidy; the American Progress analysis cites the same data as evidence of demand destruction in an emerging industry. The paper notes both interpretations are grounded in the same figure.
What the paper tracks: the instruments the law created, the population changes those instruments produced, and the distributional analysis of who bears the cost and who receives the benefit. The SNAP enrollment change is an administrative record. The ACA premium and enrollment data is an insurance-market record. The CBO distributional analysis is a nonpartisan scoring exercise. None of those sources were produced by advocates. The $51 billion corporate-concentration figure is from a tax-policy institute's reading of the same statute.
The Medicaid question is the one that will define the law's second year. The OBBBA's Medicaid work requirements and eligibility changes take effect on a staggered state implementation schedule. Several states have filed for implementation extensions; several have accelerated. The Congressional Budget Office projected that 7.2 million people would lose Medicaid coverage over the law's first decade. That wave has not yet arrived in the enrollment data. When it does, the SNAP number — 4 million — will be its preface, not its full statement.
-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago