President Donald Trump may still style himself as a D.C. outsider, but since his first campaign he has eagerly wielded the politician’s age-old cliché about wanting to root out “waste, fraud and abuse” to evade tough questions about his budget proposals.
Unsurprisingly, Trump has inserted the “waste, fraud and abuse” phrase into the rhetoric around the most important bill of his second term so far: legislation that would extend 2017’s tax cuts and partially offset the lost revenue with at least $1.5 trillion in spending reductions. However, the “big, beautiful bill,” in Trump’s typically understated parlance, faces several big roadblocks, with House Republicans debating the cap on state and local taxes, cuts to food stamps and more.
If concern for the “most vulnerable” sounds distinctly un-Trumpian, that’s because the language comes from congressional Republicans.
The largest obstacle, though, is the amount of money the GOP would have to take from Medicaid, the health care program that covers 72 million people. The House GOP’s budget blueprint tasks the Energy and Commerce Committee — which oversees Medicare and Medicaid — with finding at least $880 billion in savings over 10 years. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in March, the committee can’t come anywhere near that goal without cutting entitlements. Since Medicare is even more popular with the public, that leaves Medicaid on the chopping block by default.
But the committee has already pushed back its timeline as Republicans struggle to finalize the numbers. And there's another problem: Trump hasn’t figured out how to lie about Medicaid cuts.
In February, he said Medicaid “isn’t going to be touched” and then, the next day, endorsed the House bill that very much “touches” it. Since then, he’s mostly claimed that Republicans will target only “waste, fraud and abuse.” But at an event in Michigan last week, the president sounded yet another note. “We want to preserve Medicaid for the most vulnerable, for our kids, our pregnant women, the poor and disabled,” he said.
If concern for the “most vulnerable” sounds distinctly un-Trumpian, that’s because the language comes from congressional Republicans. Republicans on the House Budget Committee, for example, used that language in their list of possible spending cuts earlier this year.
But Trump clearly wasn’t happy with his road test of that particular piece of rhetoric. When NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked Trump on “Meet the Press” if he’d veto a bill with Medicaid cuts, Trump returned to the cliché: “I would if they were cutting it, but they’re not cutting it. They’re looking at fraud, waste and abuse.”
Given Trump’s experience as a pitchman, his inability to settle on a message perhaps reflects the difficulty of the sale. A recent survey of 10 battleground districts, conducted by GOP polling firm Meeting Street Insights on behalf of a mental health advocacy group, found that 68% of voters “say cutting Medicaid benefits in order to pay for tax cuts is a bad idea, while only 22% say it is a good idea.” The poll found voters more likely to oppose Medicare cuts to offset tax cuts regardless of age, gender and ethnicity, and even 44% of Republicans think it’s a bad idea. Even MAGA influencers like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer have warned Republicans about cutting the program.
Spinning such a budget proposal as an attack on “waste, fraud and abuse” is a nigh impossible task.
Politico, citing “six White House officials and top allies of the president,” reports that behind closed doors Trump is “unconvinced that the trade-off” between Medicaid and tax cuts “is necessary.” Moderate Republicans are skeptical, too, with a dozen representatives from battleground districts warning party leadership against “any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.” One of the Republicans, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, says he wants to limit Medicaid cuts to a mere $500 billion.
But a cut of $500 billion seems moderate only by comparison. “Even if they pare the Medicaid cuts back to ‘only’ $500 billion,” says Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, “it would still be the largest Medicaid cuts ever. No matter which way you slice it, it’s millions of people kicked off their health insurance in the largest Medicaid cuts in U.S. history.” Spinning such a budget proposal as an attack on “waste, fraud and abuse” is a nigh impossible task. And the president’s opponents must not be shy about sharing the truth.
