This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

The Trump administration has just pulled off another sweeping change to the United States.

A few moments, we're going to make official the greatest victory yet when I signed the one big, beautiful bill.

The budget bill, beautiful or not, includes cuts to social services that would have been unthinkable in earlier Republican administrations.

Ten and a half million people will be kicked off of Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance

program in the next decade. Snap and other nutrition programs will be cut by $186 billion.

Now, the foundational belief in conservative economics is that cuts to social services are necessary to shrink the expanding deficit.

But the so-called big, beautiful bill is hardly an austerity measure.

It's a windfall for the wealthy.

The Cato Institute estimates that it will add

$6 trillion to the national debt. That's $6 trillion. So to get a sense of how this is

supposed to work, I called up Janet Yellen. A few people understand the American economy

better than Janet Yellen. She's served as Treasury Secretary, leader of the White House

Council of Economic Advisers, and chair of the Federal Reserve. Her term as the Fed Chair

overlap with Donald Trump's first term in office, and curiously enough, they really didn't

come into that much conflict. But Trump now wants even more control over economic policy,

and he's hurling brickbats and insults at his own appointee for the Fed chair, Jerome Powell.

I spoke with Janet Yellen last week.

What are the implications for us in our daily lives? What are the possibilities that a federal deficit that's grown by that

much, how will that affect things?

Interest payments on this debt are now the second largest expenditure in our overall budget.

...