WASHINGTON — U.S. congressional Republicans are struggling over how to pay for President Donald Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar tax-cut and immigration reform agenda, with the fate of the Medicaid health care program and the nation’s debt ceiling hanging in the balance.
The debate has Trump’s party torn between its traditional aversion to adding to the nation’s $36.6 trillion debt and some members’ desire to protect Medicaid benefits to working-class voters who have become an important part of their base, as well as tax breaks for residents of higher-tax, typically Democratic states that helped Republicans win their current narrow House of Representatives majority.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that extending Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts and some of his other proposals like cutting taxes on tips and overtime, could add $11 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Additional funds to tighten border security, step up deportation efforts and boost military spending would add to the tab.
Members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus are aiming for $2 trillion in spending cuts over a decade, with $880 billion of that sum expected to come from Medicaid and green energy tax credits.
Moderate Republicans are pushing to limit to $250 billion the cuts to Medicaid, which covered about 35 million people in states Trump won in last year’s presidential election, and retain some green tax credits for farmers.
“They seem really far apart within our conference,” said Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a hardline conservative who wants to see trillions of dollars in spending cuts to move towards a balanced budget.
Top Senate Republican John Thune and his House counterpart Speaker Mike Johnson this week said they also aim to use the sweeping tax-cut bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, which must be done by sometime this summer to avert a devastating default.
“It provides people like me who want deeper cuts with a little more leverage,” said Lummis, of Wyoming.
Democrats, angered by the risk to Medicaid and more broadly by Trump’s campaign to radically reshape the federal government, have signaled that they will not back the plan.
“They’re raising the debt to accomplish dangerous things that will hurt the safety, security, health and welfare of the American people,” top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries told Reuters. “They’re the ones who have decided that rather than engage in responsible negotiations, they want to go it alone.”
Republicans will also face opposition from within. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said he will not support a Trump agenda bill that raises the debt ceiling.
“I’m for making the tax cuts permanent, and I’m open to discussion as to what the tax cuts are,” Paul told Reuters. “I’m just not open to adding four or five trillion to the debt limit.”
