The GOP’s budget plan makes it hard to conceal its lies about Medicaid and SNAP

Last week, House Republicans adopted their budget resolution, the first step toward enacting a bill that would kick millions off Medicaid and cut food assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to a meager $1.67 per meal for the typical recipient on average — all while providing an average tax cut of $278,000 to the top 0.1% and adding trillions of dollars to the national deficit.

There are still many steps left in this budgetary process, but House Republicans aim to use a procedure known as budget reconciliation, which allows the Senate to pass legislation with only 51 votes rather than the usual 60 required. In practical terms, this means Republicans can pass this budget without bipartisan support. In political terms, it means Republicans alone own this budget.

Understandably, there has been strong public pushback against a bill that would rip food and health care away from struggling households while enriching the wealthiest. In response, the refrain from GOP supporters of the budget resolution, again and again, has been to pretend that the resolution isn’t cutting Medicaid.

Sure, many House Republicans have said over and over they want to cut Medicaid and SNAP. But they claim they won’t do that. Instead, they say, this resolution merely directs the committees that oversee Medicaid and SNAP to cut spending. Wink, wink.

Put simply, that’s a lie. Not only have House Republicans admitted their intentions, but the simple math of their budget resolution makes cutting these programs necessary.

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Budget resolutions create binding instructions for various committees to achieve certain deficit impacts, but those instructions are not and in fact must not be specific about how to achieve those impacts. In other words, while it’s true the instructions don’t specifically call out Medicaid and SNAP, that’s because they’re literally not allowed to mention Medicaid or SNAP.

But we know the true targets of this budget resolution, because the author — House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, R-Texas — released a document in January specifying program cuts. And guess what that list featured: hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

The math the House voted to approve is also impossible without deep cuts to Medicaid and nearly impossible without cuts to SNAP. The budget resolution as passed instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to find at least $880 billion in cuts from fiscal years 2025 through 2034. And it instructs the House Agriculture Committee to find at least $230 billion in cuts within the same window.

That deficit reduction must come from the programs the committees have jurisdiction over. Only around $500 billion of funding in the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s jurisdiction is not Medicare or Medicaid.  If the advocates of this budget resolution aren’t cutting Medicare — which President Donald Trump has promised not to do — then there simply is not enough funding under the Energy and Commerce Committee’s jurisdiction to achieve $880 billion in deficit reduction without cutting Medicaid.

The House Agriculture Committee oversees $1.3 trillion in spending, of which SNAP makes up $1 trillion. It is mathematically possible to leave SNAP untouched — but it would require cutting everything else the committee oversees, on average, by 75 percent. Do you think House Republicans are going to cut all farm programs by 75 percent? Or do you think they’re cutting SNAP, as they’ve said they want to do countless times?

Republicans who support these cuts, even as they pretend the cuts don’t exist, won’t be able to maintain this fiction much longer. Right now, the House and the Senate are trying to come to an agreement on the budget resolution. At some point, they’ll have to write legislation rather than just a broad framework. And at that point, if the bill reflects what the House passed on Tuesday, the American public will see Republicans eviscerating health care and food assistance to help give tax cuts to millionaires.