Amid a hectic push to pass a House budget reconciliation bill by Independence Day, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday he thinks Republicans can find hundreds of billions of dollars in savings by eliminating Medicaid waste, fraud, and abuse.
The Medicaid issue is the trickiest part of Republicans’ push to pass a bill, which would boost funding of border security while also preventing President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year.
On Monday, House Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., confidently stated in an interview that the Government Accountability Office’s estimate of approximately $50 billion wasted a year in Medicaid means Republicans can save $500 billion in their 10-year budget framework.
“That’s $500 billion over the 10-year budget cycle. Then you start taking out illegals—there’s no reason that illegal aliens should be receiving Medicaid benefits,” he said.
Republicans’ working goal is $880 billion in cuts by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid and Medicare.
But eliminating waste through a reconciliation bill can be tricky.
For one thing, the Senate’s Byrd rule prohibits any provision that is deemed extraneous to the budget process. That means a provision that more closely resembles immigration enforcement than budget-keeping might be struck down in the Senate.
The Daily Signal asked Johnson, R-La., how exactly he would prohibit illegal immigrants from accessing Medicaid via reconciliation, and how he could confidently estimate the savings from doing so.
“Well, it’s not my estimation. I mean, these numbers come from the [Congressional Budget Office] and various credible sources,” Johnson said.
“We have a pretty accurate count, we think, of how many are on the rolls in some of these states, and now we have a tabulation of what it will save the taxpayers to kick them off …. We’re going to fix it in reconciliation.”
Johnson’s success in passing the colossal budget bill will depend on whether he can persuade Republicans in blue and purple states that he won’t cut Americans’ Medicaid payments.
“We have folks that are in our conference who want to do $880 billion [in Energy and Commerce cuts], said Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., on Sunday. Bacon is a moderate Republican from an Omaha-area swing district.
“They [leadership] have to show us how this will not impact Medicaid or the people on it,” he said.
Democrats are weaponizing the issue as a way to challenge vulnerable Republicans, since polling has consistently shown voters’ opposition to federal Medicaid cuts.
Johnson thinks he can cut most, if not all, of the waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid, delivering savings for taxpayers.
Asked by The Daily Signal how much of the $500 billion over 10 years in estimated Medicaid waste he could cut in reconciliation, Johnson said, “We’re going to try to get all of it.”
“Many people believe that’s a low estimate,” he added.
“The actual number’s $51 billion a year. Some of the information that we’ve uncovered would indicate that it is much higher. And the [Department of Government Efficiency’s] efforts have helped with all that as well. So, we’re going to try to eliminate all that, and I think we owe that to the taxpayer.”
Johnson’ speaker’s gavel might depend on it. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who reluctantly signed on to an earlier budget plan, has said the final budget bill must include considerable spending cuts.
On the other hand, Johnson’s success also depends on persuading moderates like Nebraska’s Bacon that the cuts won’t hurt their constituents.
Energy and Commerce will marking up its portion of the budget next week.
