Sitting in the House gallery, watching the One Big Beautiful Bill Act pass 218-214, I felt a unique sense of dread. I didn’t experience this feeling on Election Night 2024, nor on Inauguration Day 2025.

My dread came from a dream being crushed. I believe in America and our country’s great promise. The bill that recently passed and was signed into law eliminates the American dream for so many and will lead to deaths and an increasingly suffocating national debt.

This bill relinquishes future opportunity, giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations while stripping health care from millions of Americans. H.R. 1 will handicap our country for generations. As a 19-year-old from Maine, I deeply fear this bill’s reverberations — not just for what it takes away today, but for the long-term damage it will inflict on our nation’s foundation.

President Trump’s signature legislation is the strongest threat to our nation’s future prosperity in recent history. It will add trillions to our debt, deny millions of Americans health care and cripple our ability to continue to invest in America.

Our nation’s ballooning debt is already having severe impacts on our country, and means we’ll be paying substantial portions of the government’s revenue in interest each year — money that could be used to invest in our people and communities. This burden will fall to mine and future generations, kneecapping our ability to build on America’s promise to promote the well-being and prosperity of all its citizens.

America has built fantastic things — forging a culture and identity that is a testament to the strength of our great nation. Home to the world’s strongest academic institutions, we have been on the forefront of scientific research, leading the world in knowledge production. We created an environment that conceived the world’s largest companies and greatest technological innovations, while cultivating our national entrepreneurial spirit. Alongside these feats, we invested in our people — providing a social safety net that protects our country’s most vulnerable.

As a strong believer in the results that American governance has yielded, I have big dreams for the future. I want our nation’s leading technological advances to bring an industrial renaissance to Maine. I want our government to provide quality and affordable health care, bolstering our vibrant communities. And I want to ensure that our country won’t tolerate food and housing insecurity.

We should be securing federal dollars for communities like Millinocket, Madison and Saco, where investments in timber innovation will bring back thousands of jobs and strengthen one of our state’s key heritage industries, not frittering away government revenue on tax cuts that will force interest rates to rise and stagnate economic growth.

Trump’s big bill is not just a policy failure, it is a moral one. It trades lives for loopholes. It mortgages our future to further enrich those already obscenely wealthy, and tears at the fabric of what has made America exceptional: our ability to dream big, care for our neighbors, and invest boldly in the common good.

This bill will go down in history not as a triumph, but as a turning point: when America stopped reaching for its best self and instead hollowed itself out for short-term political gain.

But this is not yet the end of the American story. We are a country forged in struggle, built on progress, and defined by the people who dare to demand more. I believe we can reject this future of austerity. I believe we can still choose a nation that invests in its people, not one that abandons them.

We must fight, not just for programs or numbers, but for lives, for dignity and for the idea that this country belongs to all of us. If we don’t push back now, we’ll be paying the price for decades, in lost lives, lost investments and lost potential.