Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) urged House Republicans to heed President Trump’s advice on Medicaid, seeking to blunt efforts to significantly cut health benefits in the GOP’s mammoth budget bill.

The president met with GOP members in the Capitol on Tuesday to solidify support for the “one big beautiful” spending bill aimed at extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, bolstering border security and raising the nation’s debt ceiling while proposing cuts to the insurance program that provides coverage to lower-income families and individuals with disabilities.

Trump, behind closed doors, told party members not to “f‑‑‑ with Medicaid.”

“I hope congressional Republicans are listening,” Hawley wrote in a Tuesday post, resharing a report about Trump telling the GOP at the meeting to leave Medicaid alone.

Hawley has long warned his party against Medicaid cuts, writing in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month that slashing health care for the working poor “is both morally wrong and politically suicidal.”

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Proposed cuts have raised concerns for lawmakers across the country after a Congressional Budget Office report said the spending bill could result in 10.3 million people losing Medicaid coverage by 2034 and 7.6 million people going uninsured.

In past weeks, Republicans have pledged not to touch the insurance program despite legislative language suggesting they would.

“Our priority remains the same: strengthen and sustain Medicaid for those whom the program was intended to serve: expectant mothers, children, people with disabilities, and the elderly,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) said last week.

He added that the reforms will “return taxpayer dollars to middle-class families.”

Trump on Tuesday argued that Republicans should focus on “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid, maintaining, “We are not doing any cutting of anything meaningful.”

After Trump’s Capitol meeting, House Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said the president didn’t convince enough people that the current spending bill is “adequate.”

House Republican leaders are pushing to pass the bill before Memorial Day.

Democrats, meanwhile, have blasted the GOP legislation, asserting it would harm vulnerable women and children most. 

“It’s clear that all this bill does is take away health care for millions of Americans in order to pay for giant tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations. And that’s not what the American people want,” Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), the top Democrat on Energy and Commerce Committee, said last week.