Although cuts to Medicaid by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last July comprise the lion’s share of the losses — approximately $48 billion over the next decade — there are also several other instances of the Trump administration pulling or threatening to pull billions more from Illinois and Chicago. 

For instance, $2.1 billion in federal funds intended for the Chicago Transit Authority to expand the Red Line have been in limbo for about a year now, another $2.7 billion in federal funding for the city of Chicago has been in dispute for months due to Trump’s attacks on "sanctuary cities," and Trump has tried to cut $1 billion from Illinois that was intended to help needy families, food banks and school lunches for children.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg: There have been scores of other threats Trump and his administration have made against Illinois and Chicago since his second term began over funding for energy projects, education programs, health care for transgender patients and more.

While much of that funding — and other policy moves by Trump — has already either been restored or kept in place by lawsuits, economic and political experts called the presidential animosity of the past 13 months “unprecedented,” and warned that Illinois residents will be hit hard in the pocketbook for years to come.

“Broadly, federal funding and investments affect business income, worker paychecks and out-of-pocket costs for families. And these chaotic and haphazard cuts were self-inflicted wounds,” said Frank Manzo, executive director at the Illinois Economic Policy Institute. “Their impacts are going to be both damaging and lasting across the Illinois economy.”

The IEPI found in a report issued in December that, as of November 2025, funding cuts to Illinois under the second Trump administration will cost the state $8 billion a year by 2029, and shrink the state economy by $10 billion.

Manzo said the “human cost” of the cuts will arrive in myriad ways, from lost jobs to increasing utility and medical bills to erasing longstanding social safety nets.

“Trains may not run on time. Buses may not run on time. All because of these cuts,” Manzo said. “The working families, the construction trades people, vulnerable populations, they’re the ones who are going to be hit the hardest.”

The steady barrage against Illinois and Chicago since January 2025 is “striking” when all considered together in a chronological timeline, said Justin Marlowe, a research professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

“There’s no question we’ve not seen anything like this, ever, in American federalism,” Marlowe said. “It has been one threat after another . . . and you have to take every one of these threats as something that could materialize.”

Not only that, but the chainsaw-wielding approach to federal budget slashing throughout the second Trump administration is bound to affect not only liberals and Democrats, but Trump voters who live in Illinois and other midwestern states, Marlowe said. That’s because Illinois — along with other states — is being forced to rework government budgets to account for the cuts, which has a ripple effect across expenditures.

“You can’t take money out of Head Start without forcing other money in the (Chicago General Fund) to be moved around to compensate for that,” Marlowe said, referring to some of the federal education cuts made under the Trump administration. “So everybody will feel this, whether you participate or benefit from the programs that are being cut directly or not. Everybody will feel this.”

That may be a political silver lining, said Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Dadayan said it’s far from only Democratic-led states that are feeling the financial pinch under the second Trump administration, particularly with gigantic health care cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, which was passed by Congressional Republicans in July and signed into law by Trump on the Fourth of July. 

That could eventually lead to bipartisan political pushback on Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to federal spending, Dadayan said.

“One thing is sure: It’s not just impacting blue states. It’s also impacting red states. So there might be some push from the red states to undo some of the cuts,” Dadayan said, when asked how hard or easy it may be for Trump’s successor to restore funding to Illinois or other states targeted by the administration.

Dadayan called the scale of federal spending cuts “very concerning,” given that the breadth and depth of such cuts were only made in the past if there was some dire external factor, such as a recession. Dadayan said the second Trump administration has “changed the entire nature of our federal system, the reliance on federal government funding.”

“In this short term, cash flow becomes really a policy weapon,” Dadayan said.

John Austin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in three decades of policy analysis, he’s never seen a president use the federal purse as a cudgel the way Trump has against states he doesn’t like, such as Illinois.

“’Trump Two’ has meant 10 times bigger negative effects of public policies, whether it’s tariffs, immigration,” or “pulling the plug” on industrial project funding in energy, transportation or other sectors, Austin said, comparing the president’s current term to his first run in the Oval Office.

Austin said Trump’s reduction in higher education funding for various universities is, to him, a particular example of the administration “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” given how higher education research is often an economic driver for the nation.

Still, Austin remains optimistic some of the worst effects of the federal cuts could yet be rolled back in the near future, simply because courts have already blocked many of the president’s threats, and because Trump has shown a tendency to change course when the stock market reacts poorly to a decision he’s made.

“If the markets react, then he chickens out. The TACO maneuver,” Austin said, referring to a Wall Street Journal report from last year that revealed stock traders were using the acronym as an abbreviation for “Trump Always Chickens Out” when the stock market plummets.

Austin and other experts said a good bit of the budget-slashing by Trump is likely to be undone by a possible successor, but the biggest cuts — such as those to Medicaid — will be tougher to solve because it’ll take another act of Congress. 

There’s also likely to be some haggling between Trump and Illinois leaders for a quid pro quo on some federal funding — like the $2.1 billion for the CTA Red Line extension that is currently in limbo. Marlowe said the Trump White House may be willing to release that money in exchange for some still-unnamed price, whether a new policy Trump wants established, or something else.

“There’ll be a price to pay, that’s for sure,” Marlowe predicted.