WASHINGTON ― Republicans in the House are considering big cuts to Medicaid — and that isn’t sitting well with one Republican senator, who’s arguing they’d harm many people who voted for President Donald Trump.
“I would not do severe cuts to Medicaid,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told HuffPost in an interview on Tuesday.
He said he agreed with MAGA whisperer Steve Bannon, who warned over the weekend that the right “can’t just take a meat axe” to the program because it also benefits low-income Trump supporters.
Hawley’s objection to carving up Medicaid will be yet another complication for Republicans as they seek to enact Trump’s legislative agenda and extend his 2017 tax cuts. In the House, GOP lawmakers are eyeing massive spending reductions to offset some of the cost of the tax cuts, which they have pegged at $4.5 trillion over 10 years. They’ve signaled these savings measures will include cuts to Medicaid, which pays medical bills for about 72 million low-income Americans, including millions of children.
Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are pushing forward with their own slimmer budget plan that would first boost border security, defense and energy policy, and want to tackle passing tax cuts later on. The two chambers still aren’t any closer to uniting around a singular strategy.
Hawley said his fellow Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has “a tough, tough road ahead of him” coming up with nearly $900 billion in spending cuts to help offset the cost of the tax reductions.
“I don’t like the idea of massive Medicaid cuts. We should have no Medicare cuts of any kind,” the senator added.
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Missouri voters expanded Medicaid in 2021 under the Affordable Care Act, adding an estimated half a million people to the program, despite opposition to the move by the state’s GOP leadership.
Broad cuts to Medicaid benefits could also pose a problem for other Republican lawmakers from lower-income areas that Trump won in the 2024 presidential election. Last week, Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), a first-term moderate, announced that the proposed cuts to federal safety net programs might be a step too far, noting he had 200,000 Medicaid recipients in his district.
“I ran for Congress under a promise of always doing what is best for the people of Northeastern Pennsylvania,” Bresnahan said in a statement. “If a bill is put in front of me that guts the benefits my neighbors rely on, I will not vote for it.”