Budget update: Second deadline for "one big, beautiful bill" goes off rails, Congressional resistance hardens

A tale of dolls (but not trucks) and hints of sanity from new places, with sudden, very different directives yesterday from the White House, plus a clear tweak from Rome.

Why this matters to women: We’re the family Chief Medical Officers. We coordinate health care for our kids, our parents, and our spouses and partners (and their parents and relatives). We’re Health Info Central for half the ‘hood and for many colleagues at work and in our communities. Together, Medicaid, Medicare and the ACA (“Obamacare”) cover 62% of Americans¹, and Speaker Johnson homed in on an 11%+ reduction in Medicaid (or possibly Medicare or even Social Security) without saying it out loud to give the president what he wanted. ACA expansion cuts are also on the table.² Bottom line for women: The odds are 6 out of 10 that the health coverage of someone(s) we know and love in our communities and our families—kids, aging parents, nieces/nephews—is under threat to advance the president’s spending priorities: border security, increasing defense spending, and making a tax cut permanent that primarily benefits the top 10% of households.³ And then the economy and retirement savings took a nose dive, threatening livelihoods and household budgets along with everything else.

You’ll recall from previous episodes that Speaker Mike Johnson, all over Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill,” set an artificial deadline for budget reconciliation of mid-March. The Senate and the House were leagues apart on that, and while the bill passed in the House, it was by only two votes, and that after significant intervention by the president. Johnson’s excitement about going after entitlement cuts—largely presumed to be Medicaid cuts—was not mirrored in the Senate.

The Senate—smarter about the election track record of parties that reduce healthcare benefits—said no, and everyone stopped, passed a continuing resolution to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year (Sept 30), and took a breath.

Johnson then came up with a the idea of putting a budget bill on the president’s desk by Memorial Day, pushing Congress to get it done now.

But since March, a lot has happened. Things are very different now, and have even changed rapidly in just the past 24 hours with some surprise directives from the White House.