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reconciliation bill
'Families Lose and Billionaires Win': Senate GOP Signals Support for Medicaid Cuts
"Trump and Senate Republicans are showing who they truly care about as they slash programs for families to line the pockets of their billionaire friends," said Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley.
Feb 21, 2025
Senate Republicans approved a budget resolution early Friday after rejecting a flurry of Democratic amendments aimed at preventing cuts to Medicaid, school meal initiatives, and other programs.
Republicans in the House and Senate are moving in the direction of legislation that would slash critical programs to help fund trillions of dollars in tax cuts, which would primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans. Both chambers' resolutions would also increase the U.S. military budget, which is approaching $1 trillion per year.
President Donald Trump has endorsed the House budget resolution, which is broader than the measure the Republican-controlled Senate passed in a mostly party-line vote on Friday morning, following a marathon "vote-a-rama." The two chambers must ultimately reconcile their differences to advance Trump's legislative agenda.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted after the Senate GOP unveiled its resolution earlier this month that "the budget framework lays a path for a future budget bill that could pay for increased military and homeland security spending with harmful policies that take food assistance and health coverage away from people who struggle to afford the basics and make college more expensive."
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said following the upper chamber's passage of the GOP resolution that "families lose and billionaires win."
"That's the heart of the Republicans' budget resolution," said Merkley. "This Republican budget proposes $1 trillion cuts to programs for working families by the end of this fiscal year. The only way to cut $1 trillion by September 30 is to gut entire agencies and all of their services, which families rely on. Trump and Senate Republicans are showing who they truly care about as they slash programs for families to line the pockets of their billionaire friends. Trump's tax plan is the Great Betrayal of working families."
"The American people are sick and tired of this bait-and-switch of Republicans campaigning on fiscal responsibility and then governing by driving up deficits and debt at the expense of critical programs," the senator added.
The Republican budget plan is simple: billionaires win, families lose. Republicans say it's about border security, but it's not. They want to rip away support for working Americans, gut critical programs like Medicaid, and balloon the deficit.
— Jeff Merkley (@jeff-merkley.bsky.social) February 19, 2025 at 10:38 PM
Among the Democratic amendments Senate Republicans rejected during the all-night voting session were proposals "against legislation that would cut funding from the school lunch or school breakfast programs," "against legislation that would reduce Medicare and Medicaid benefits for Americans," "to prevent tax cuts for the wealthy if a single dollar of Medicaid funding is cut," and halt the Trump administration's attack on National Institutes of Health funding.
"The Trump administration is working to destroy medical research as we know it with an illegal, unrealistic cap on the NIH reimbursement rate for indirect costs," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the sponsor of the latter amendment, said Friday. "That would mean: cancer researchers laid off, lifesaving clinical trials cancelled, and more. It also violates bipartisan appropriations law. I should know, I helped author that provision. And Republicans should know—they worked with me to pass it."
The Senate votes came after Trump endorsed a House GOP budget resolution that seeks to combine elements president's agenda—including tax cuts for the wealthy and border militarization—into one sprawling, filibuster-proof reconciliation bill.
Trump declared Wednesday that the House resolution, which calls for $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next 10 years, "implements my FULL America First Agenda."
GOP Proposes $4.5 Trillion Tax Giveaway to the Rich While 'Ransacking' Food Stamps and Medicaid
"House Republican leadership put a giant bullseye on Medicaid, with the intent to strip Americans of their healthcare benefits to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations."
Feb 12, 2025
House Republicans unveiled a draft budget resolution on Wednesday that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax breaks that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy while proposing $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other programs.
Lawmakers are set to mark up the House GOP's budget blueprint on Thursday as Republicans look to craft a sprawling reconciliation bill that can pass both chambers of Congress with a simple-majority vote. Last week, Senate Republicans released their own budget resolution that proposed significant cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other spending that benefits working-class families.
"Instead of tackling rising prices and delivering relief for American families, House Republicans are charging ahead with trillions of dollars in deeply unpopular tax breaks for billionaires like Donald Trump and Elon Musk," Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative, said Wednesday in response to the House GOP resolution.
"And, they're paying for their billionaire handouts by ransacking healthcare, food assistance, and other vital programs that American workers and families rely on," Jacquez added.
The new resolution released by the Republican-controlled House Budget Committee specifically calls on the chamber's energy and commerce panel to "submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction to reduce the deficit by not less than" $880 billion over the next decade. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over Medicaid.
The measure also instructs the House Committee on Agriculture, which has jurisdiction over SNAP, to cut no less than $230 billion in spending between fiscal years 2025 and 2034.
"They wanna do a giant tax cut that disproportionately helps the rich while taking away people's health insurance and food while still adding trillions to the debt," Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Budget Committee staffer who is now senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, wrote in response to the resolution.
Overall, the House GOP's budget resolution calls for $2 trillion in cuts to "mandatory spending" over the next decade, taking aim at a category that includes Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and SNAP. While Social Security benefits cannot be cut through the reconciliation process, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) can.
Congressional Republicans have outlined a number of ways they could slash Medicaid and SNAP, including punitive new work requirements that analysts say would strip benefits from tens of millions of low-income people.
But Families USA executive director Anthony Wright said Wednesday that "we don't need to know the mechanisms of how Medicaid would be cut to know the impact would be catastrophic: The sheer size of the proposed cuts means millions of Americans losing coverage, hospitals and clinics plunged into budget shortfalls, and healthcare services we all depend on being eliminated."
"This budget resolution is a five-alarm fire alert for our healthcare," said Wright. "House Republican leadership put a giant bullseye on Medicaid, with the intent to strip Americans of their healthcare benefits to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations."
Kobie Christian, a spokesperson for the progressive coalition Unrig Our Economy, issued a similarly scathing statement on Wednesday, arguing that House Republicans "showed us that what they value is more tax breaks for greedy billionaires and giant corporations with everyday people paying the price."
"At a time when everyday Americans face increasingly higher prices, Speaker Johnson and his stooges want to write billionaires a check and force working-class people to foot the bill for their outrageous tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-wealthy," said Christian. "Everyday Americans will not stand for these games—it's time for Republicans in Congress to end their campaign that puts the ultra-wealthy first on the backs of the rest of us."
'Abominable': Trump and GOP Float Tying Los Angeles Wildfire Aid to Debt Ceiling
"It's outrageous that Trump and House Republicans are threatening to withhold recovery aid if their conditions aren't met," said a leader in the Working Families Party.
Jan 13, 2025
The deputy national director of the Working Families Party had sharp words for a group of House Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump, who, according to Politicoreporting published Monday, discussed tying fire relief for California to the politically charged issue of increasing the debt ceiling.
The reporting comes as California continues to battle fires in the Los Angeles area that have consumed tens of thousands of acres and left over 20 people dead. The scale of the destruction could make them, collectively, the costliest wildfire disaster in U.S. history, a climate scientist told the Los Angeles Times last week.
"The Palisades wildfires have destroyed homes, schools, and businesses and left thousands of families without a roof over their heads. It's outrageous that Trump and House Republicans are threatening to withhold recovery aid if their conditions aren't met," said Working Families Party deputy national director Joe Dinkin in a statement Monday.
"Every Republican should be on the record denouncing this abominable plan," he added.
Per Politico, nearly two dozen House Republicans attended a dinner at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club over the weekend where the option was discussed.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Fla.), who was not a part of the conversation but did later confirm the conversation, must deal with the looming debt cliff, which is set to be reached sometime in mid-January, and he faces obstacles within his own party. In December, fractures appeared in the GOP when fiscal hawks refused to back legislation that Trump supported that would have raised the debt limit.
Johnson has also said he would try to lift the debt limit by including it in a reconciliation bill full of President-elect Donald Trump's legislative priorities, though this could run afoul with those same fiscal hawks. Some House Republicans reportedly brought up the pitfalls of this option during discussions at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend.
Of the potential move to link fire relief to the debt ceiling, Politico reported: "The Sunday night discussions prove Republicans are desperately looking for a plan before the nation is due to exhaust its borrowing authority—though Democrats and some Republicans are sure to balk at the prospect of linking disaster relief dollars to a politically charged exercise like extending the debt limit."
Congress recently passed a spending bill that included funding for natural disaster relief, but scope of the destruction in California has some officials wondering if more may be needed, Politico reports.
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