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A viral graphic warns that if the House-passed reconciliation bill becomes law, “we won’t have another election.” But there is no evidence to support that or some of the graphic’s underlying claims about “what’s coming” if the Senate also approves the legislation without any changes. For other claims, it’s unclear what they are based on.
For starters, the bill does not allow President Donald Trump to “delay or cancel elections,” as the graphic falsely alleges. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress and states — not the president — the authority to set the dates for federal elections. That doesn’t change under the bill.
There also doesn’t appear to be anything in the bill that says “protests can be tracked and criminalized,” or that “your VPN,” short for virtual private network, will be “tracked.” And while there is a provision in the bill that would make it easier to fire some federal employees – it may not allow blatant firings for “political disloyalty,” as the graphic also says.
However, a number of legal experts have said that a section of the bill could make it more difficult for federal judges to “enforce their own orders” holding the Trump administration and others in contempt of court, as the graphic claims.
The graphic, which several readers have asked us about and has been circulating since at least late May, does not include any sources or citations to back up the claims it makes. But in this article, we’ll cover what evidence exists — or not — for its claims.
Elections
“If the Senate passes the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ and Trump signs it, that’s it,” the graphic says before outlining what the measure “really means” for the country. It goes on to list a number of things that will purportedly happen if the bill reaches Trump’s desk.
“He can delay or cancel elections – legally,” the graphic then says of Trump. That’s false. Nowhere in the bill does it say that the president can do that.
“The bill does not say anything about delaying or canceling elections,” said Eric Kashdan, senior legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, which reviewed the bill. In an interview, he told us that “Congress and the states are the ones who have power over elections, not the president.”
Indeed, as the Congressional Research Service has explained, the Constitution gives the ultimate power to set the general election date for presidential and congressional races to Congress, which, in 1845, established a law designating the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November as Election Day.
And “neither the Constitution nor Congress provides any … power to the President or other federal officials to change this date outside of Congress’s regular legislative process,” the CRS said in 2020, and again in 2024. In the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which was part of an appropriations bill that became law that year, Congress made clear that states have the option to push back the voting date in presidential elections — but only in the event of “force majeure events that are extraordinary and catastrophic,” and only if the date change is specified in advance through a state law.
Court Orders
The graphic’s claim that “judges can’t enforce their own orders” is almost certainly a reference to a bill provision that legal experts say would limit the power of judges to hold the Trump administration and others in contempt for violating court orders.
Section 70302 of the passed bill says: “No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.”
A security is a bond or payment made by the party who requested the injunction or restraining order. The bond is a way of holding the petitioner liable for damages or costs if the injunction or restraining order is later found to have been wrongful.
That section of the bill “really does tie the judge’s hands,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told us in an interview. Olson has written that federal judges rarely set a security bond for government cases in the public interest.
Critics of the provision say this would be a way for the Trump administration to get around orders from judges who have issued rulings blocking the enforcement of some of the president’s policies.
“Without the contempt power, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, wrote in a May 19 piece for Just Security. “There is no way to understand this except as a way to keep the Trump administration from being restrained when it violates the Constitution or otherwise breaks the law.”
The Trump administration has argued that such a requirement would protect against “frivolous suits” and “wrongly issued” injunctions.
If the bill became law, Olson said judges could start setting security bonds, even really small amounts, in future cases challenging the government. But they wouldn’t be able to do so for existing court orders.
“There are countless … injunctions out there that were issued last year, or 10 years ago, or 50 years ago, which are still in effect, and which, for the most part … no security was given, so none of them get saved by this clause, which means that … all the existing injunctions become unenforceable by contempt citation for failure to comply,” he said.
If Section 70302 is also the basis for the graphic’s claim that the bill would allow Trump to “ignore Supreme Court rulings for a year or more,” Olson said that it’s almost always the case that court orders holding officials in contempt are issued by a lower federal court — not the nation’s highest court. “Therefore the enforcement of it through contempt is done by a lower court rather than the Supreme Court,” he said.
But the fate of that section of the bill is up in the air. That’s because the rules of reconciliation, which is the process that Republicans are using to try to pass the bill with less than 60 Senate votes, require bill provisions to have a direct impact on the budget. A Congressional Budget Office analysis said that section “would have no budgetary effect.”
So, the Senate parliamentarian could rule that the provision doesn’t meet the standards of reconciliation and should be removed from the bill. But if Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune disagrees, he could call for a vote to overrule the parliamentarian, the Washington Post reported.
Political Firings
The graphic’s claim that the bill means that Trump “can fire government workers for political disloyalty” could be a reference to Section 90002 in the bill, which requires some new civilian federal employees to either elect to become at-will employees, or to contribute an additional 5% of their income to the federal pension program. The bill says that at-will employees “may be subject to an adverse action up to and including removal, without notice or right to appeal, by the head of the agency at which the individual is employed for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.”
But a termination for clear political reasons could be subject to litigation, said Michael Foreman, a clinical professor of law at Penn State Dickinson Law and the director of its Civil Rights Appellate Clinic.
“If enacted even with the at will language an individual fired for political beliefs would have valid first amendment claims for the government’s violation of their right to free speech,” he told us in an email. “Even in states that are ‘at will’ that standard does not allow employers to violate constitutional rights or other laws giving protections.”
“For example,” Foreman said, “even in states that allow employers to fire for any reason or no reason – that provision does not allow them to fire the employee for say race based reasons which would violate state and federal law or one that would violate the US constitution.”
Other Claims
The graphic claims that under the bill “protests can be tracked and criminalized,” but Kashdan told us that he had “not seen anything in the bill directly on that.”
After that, the graphic says: “LGBTQ+ rights, education, health care, and media? Gutted.”
It’s not clear why the graphic says that the bill guts media. The word “media” appears in the bill one time – in regard to “magnetic media” as an acceptable medium to satisfy electronic filing requirements for qualified opportunity funds and qualified rural opportunity funds.
As for LGBTQ+ rights, that could be a reference to provisions in the bill that restrict health services for transgender people. Section 44125 prohibits Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from using federal funds to cover “gender transition procedures.” Also, Section 44201 would remove, starting in 2027, gender transition procedures as an essential health benefit required under the Affordable Care Act.
The bill includes additional provisions that affect health care coverage for other people. As we’ve written, the bill is projected to save $344 billion alone by changing work requirements for individuals who receive Medicaid benefits. The CBO estimated that the work requirement changes could lead to 5.2 million people in 2034 losing Medicaid coverage, including 4.8 million who would become uninsured. Overall, the CBO said that all of the bill’s provisions influencing health care could cause 10.9 million more people to be without insurance in 2034.
On the subject of education, the graphic could be referring to parts of the bill that would affect higher education in the U.S. For instance, Section 30031 of the bill would change eligibility requirements for the federal Pell Grant program for low-income students, including an increase in the number of college credit hours students need to qualify. In a preliminary analysis, the CBO estimated that raising the number of required credits would result in more than half of students already enrolled receiving less grant money.
Meanwhile, another provision in the bill, Section 30011, eliminates federally subsidized loans for undergraduate students and ends Direct PLUS Loans for borrowers, starting in July 2026 — although the bill provides an exemption for students already receiving those loans prior to the enforcement date.
The last item on the graphic’s list says: “Your VPN? Tracked. Your vote? Suppressed. Your speech? Flagged.”
We did not find that the bill says that there will be tracking of virtual private networks, which encrypt users’ computer data when connecting to the internet. There do not appear to be provisions calling for the monitoring of speech, either. In addition, Kashdan told us that “the bill does not give the president power to suppress votes.”
But he said that it could be that the creator of the graphic was making a different argument.
“What I think they’re saying with this list of examples is that if they pass the provision that would restrict federal courts of power to enforce judicial rulings, then it would make it a lot harder for courts to hold the administration accountable if it breaks the law in any of these ways,” Kashdan said.
If that is the case, it certainly isn’t clear from the graphic, which suggests that this is a list of things in the bill. At least some of them are not.
If more information emerges about the basis for the claims, we’ll update the story.
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