As President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk escalated their feud, Senate Republicans were escalating their search for spending reductions in the “big, beautiful bill” that started the feud in the first place. Not satisfied with massive reductions to Medicaid, GOP lawmakers — with the president’s support — now have Medicare in their sights, according to NBC News. That would mean cuts to two of the U.S. government’s three big entitlement programs, and Republicans’ talking points could just as easily be turned against the third entitlement: Social Security.
The version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that emerged from the House last month would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (other private forecasts show similar tides of red ink). Some Senate Republicans want to decrease the amount the bill adds to the debt; others want to offset making some of the bill’s business tax incentives permanent. Rather than dial back any of the bill’s $1.6 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest 5% of Americans, both groups have converged on increasing the bill’s equally large amount of spending cuts.
The problem for Republicans is that all three programs serve millions of Americans, including millions of Trump voters.
Normally, the first area where the GOP would look to reduce spending is anything that helps the poor, such as Medicaid and SNAP. But since the bill already includes $1.3 trillion in cuts to those programs, as well as subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s health care plans, even Republicans have concluded those wells are tapped out. So they’ve moved on to Medicare, reprising the same argument for slashing Medicaid by over $600 billion.
“How much waste, fraud, abuse is there in Medicare — why don’t we go after that? I think we should,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., told Politico. “I think anything that is waste, fraud and abuse are obviously open to discussions,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said when asked about Medicare cuts Thursday, one day after GOP senators met with Trump to discuss the bill.
At that meeting, according to the senators, Trump expressed support for the sleight of hand. “What the president made clear is [he] does not want to see any cuts to beneficiaries. But to go after, he repeated over again, the waste, fraud and abuse, the waste, fraud and abuse,” Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said. White House spokesman Kush Desai confirmed as much in a statement: “The president has been clear — no cuts to Medicare, Social Security, or Medicaid. This bill addresses waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending.”
The problem for Republicans is that all three programs serve millions of Americans, including millions of Trump voters. And cutting these programs is incredibly unpopular with voters (because, contrary to conventional wisdom in Washington, voters like most specific government outlays even if they say they want smaller government in the abstract).
Recognizing this, Trump promised during a Fox News interview in February that “Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched.” But within a day of the interview airing, he endorsed the House GOP’s budget plan, including hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts. To reconcile the contradiction, the president has tested multiple arguments, but only “waste, fraud and abuse” has persisted.
More spending bills are coming, which means more cuts will need to be made to meet GOP priorities.
Not that the talking point has worked with voters. A KFF poll released Friday found that despite weeks of Republicans banging the “waste, fraud and abuse” drum, most Americans worry about the Medicaid cuts’ impact. More than 70% of Americans, including 44% of Republicans, believe the GOP bill will cause more Americans to be uninsured, for example (and indeed, the CBO estimates those cuts will leave more than 10 million Americans without health insurance).
Unsurprisingly, then, some GOP senators fear targeting Medicare as well, no matter the rhetoric. “We should not be touching Medicare,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told NBC News. “In 2004, President Bush got re-elected and promptly tried to privatize Social Security, and Republicans didn’t win the popular vote for 20 years.”
Speaking of Social Security, though: If Republicans deem “waste, fraud and abuse” sufficient cover not just for cuts to Medicaid but for cuts to Medicare as well, what’s to stop them from applying that to Social Security next?
Recall that in that same February interview, Trump promised, “Social Security won’t be touched, other than this fraud or something we’re going to find.” In his joint address to Congress, Trump argued that Social Security was rife with fraud. And when he and Musk were still friends, both claimed that “millions and millions” of Social Security recipients were in fact dead — even though his acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration admitted that was false. The president and his allies have already chosen the falsehood; it only remains to swap one program in for another.
Even if the final version of this megabill only hurts Medicaid, the Republicans have at least another 18 months with a governing trifecta in Washington. More spending bills are coming, which means more cuts will need to be made to meet GOP priorities. If Republicans were truly interested in cutting “waste,” they would target the bloated budget of the Pentagon, which has failed seven consecutive annual audits. If they wanted to combat “fraud and abuse,” they would stop the DOGE-driven staffing cuts at the Internal Revenue Service, which help tax cheats get away with hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes every year.
But conservative dogma forbids those solutions, preferring entitlement programs as targets. And Republicans already have their excuses ready to go. To most Americans, Social Security and Medicare may be entitlements. To Trump and GOP lawmakers, they’re just “waste, fraud and abuse.”
