Weekly Update: 7/8/2025

Among the most significant events of the past week was the enactment of the national budget reconciliation package, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill. Many of the original concerns in the bill related to democratic decline have been removed, and on the whole, the bill is in line with traditional Republican budgets. Critics have expressed concerns that the budget reconciliation process was misused to enact broad policy goals, and that was certainly true of the original version of the bill, but the Senate Parliamentarian struck several non-budget items and the final bill followed the Parliamentarian's recommendations. Objections to the final version of the bill are generally based on substantive policy disagreements, not that the bill represents a further decline of democratic processes.

But there is one part of the bill that is likely to impact the Threat Index score, and that is the dramatic increase in funds for immigration enforcement. Currently, the Scapegoating & Persecution of Targeted “Out-Groups” criteria receives a score of 6, representing MAGA's scapegoating of immigrants for the nation's crime and economic woes and the remarkable spectacle of masked Border Patrol and ICE agents arresting people off the streets with the support of a domestic deployment of military force. One of the key reasons that the score has not escalated to a 7, despite these unprecedented enforcement measures, is that there has not been the infrastructure for a mass, nation-wide roundup of immigrants and their relocation to detention camps. The One Big Beautiful Bill provides new funds that appear to be earmarked for that purpose.