No shutdown: Republicans kick the can on Medicaid cuts for now, and Dems go along
Update March 14: Johnson managed to corral the House to pass a continuing resolution, and the Dems in the Senate went along to prevent a shudown. Huge decisions are coming before September.
MARCH 14 UPDATE: Speaker Johnson somehow again wrangled his party into unanimous approval of a Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government through the end of September 2025. I’m not a fan, but you have to give the man credit; he somehow keeps Trump going in a relatively (for Trump) predictable smooth direction and to also talk his more obstreporous folks into voting along party lines, something prior R speakers haven’t been able to accomplish.
The Republicans dared Democrats to block the bill and get blamed for putting the country into shutdown, which does not have a good history for any party that does that. Democrats decided to fight another day rather than force a shutdown that would have left thousands of federal employees furloughed just days before the winter holidays. Democrats knew there was no guarantee that furloughed employees would ever be allowed to return.
The CR funds most programs and activities at the FY2024 level. The next big challenge is still ahead though: the only place they’re going to find the $1T in cuts Trump wants to fund his tax cut is from Medicaid…and possibly Medicare. This continuing resolution kicks that can down the road, but only for six months. See more about that battle below, because it affects nearly every American family—particularly women, who are the go-to resources for family needs in healthcare.
The includes cutting a previously-approved $1B from the DC budget, which one Huffington Post speaker described on NPR today as “giving Democrats the middle finger” by referencing prior Democratic pushes to defund police—which it’s alleged the $1B would do. Huff Post now reports “The Senate quickly passed a follow-up bill to fix the [DC] cut, which turned out to be a mistake, but it’s unclear how soon the House will consider it or if it would pass the lower chamber.”
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Women are the Chief Medical Officers for spouses and partners, aging parents, kids, and half the people at work and in our communities. When something goes very wrong in healthcare, we’re the ones they call for help. Which is why we—Women Unbroken—are posting updates on the federal budgeting process.
There are only two places with budgets large enough where cuts could give the president the $4.6T tax cut he wants: entitlements required by law (Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security) or Defense. Reading the tea leaves, it was pretty clear they’d head for Medicaid before Defense. Keep in mind we’re not talking a minor hit: Medicaid and Medicare, together with Obamacare ACA) cover almost 65% of the population. And somewhere in those programs are people we know and love who depend on them…a lot.
Here’s how to make your voice heard to your Senators and Representatives.
In prior posts, we covered the main issues:
The House proposed a budget that certainly looked like $880 B would come out of Medicaid or Medicare to fund the president’s $4.6T tax cut—a cut that gives 5% of the population half the benefit. The other 323 million of us would share the other half of the cut. Click for more.
The Senate, keenly aware that He Who Touches Healthcare Dies in the Next Election, wanted to give the president some wins now and worry about the tax cut and more money for immigration some other day. Any other day.
That was all in Getting Serious Week One, and got us to Week Two of the battle, when the House’s proposal went off to the CBO for analysis. Last week brought bad news to the House in a new national survey and the reply from the CBO.
Senators had already been knocking on the president’s door, worried about the House proposal (which they didn’t actually think would pass). And GOP hardliners, who’d been strong-armed to vote yes on the House proposal, started to really dig in. Suddenly the president had an epiphany that maybe we should just kick the can down the road a few months—versus “one big beautiful” funding bill he’d previously wanted now. Classic Trump: Ignore all advice, make a big play. It works, you’re home free. If it doesn’t, pivot on a dime (leaving mass confusion) or sue.
Here’s where we are today, including stories that are paywalled elsewhere, but gifted here for you.
The AP headline says it all: House Republicans unveil bill to avoid shutdown and they’re daring Democrats to oppose it.
Two days ago, back came the CBO with the obvious (gifted article): the GOP would have to cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals. At the same time, a new survey came out that showed 80% of Americans don’t want Medicaid touched, including a majority of Republicans.
Also in that survey: More than nine out of ten said Medicaid is important to the their local communities, including Republicans and rural residents who voted for Trump. And more than six out of ten said family members or close friends had been covered by Medicaid, including Republicans.
The original House proposal didn’t specify where their proposed total cuts should come from; instead they used magical thinking that I wish I could use at home. They just said “somebody” should cut out this much money and went to play golf, leaving it to the Committees—like the House Energy and Commerce Committee that oversees Medicaid and Medicare—to figure out the gory details.
To give you a sense of what that would look like, here’s another gifted article on the potential effect of Medicaid cuts on rural hospitals and maternity care. Keep in mind more than 1000 counties—over a third of all US counties—are already classified as “maternity care deserts” with no maternity care [map]—which also means OBs aren’t going to practice there with no OB unit, exacerbating an already-existing national shortage of OB-Gyns, a planned topic here in the near future. And rural hospitals are constantly on the brink of closing.
That of course is a huge problem for Republicans in particular, although not why you’d hope, such as concerns about access to, and quality of, healthcare. It’s because rural counties are more often red than blue, use more Medicaid than urban areas, and are already pretty worked up about healthcare and loss of hospitals and physicians. [See the same survey on those issues, and our prior posts, above.] And, as noted in our earlier posts, there’s a long vivid political history of what happens when you mess with people’s healthcare: you lose in the next election.
Definitely time to reassess.
The deadline is midnight this Friday, March 14 to put up or shut down, and Johnson is teeing up a vote on Tuesday to test his optimistic waters. Here’s where things are now at Shutdown-6 and, trust us, they’re all working this weekend.
No party wants to get blamed for shutting down the government. Fortunately for us this year, the president already tried that once. If nothing else, he learns when he hits an expensive brick wall. In 2018-19 he kicked off the longest, most expensive shutdown in our history1, which provided Dems with excellent 2020 campaign material. So, the new House proposal taunts Democrats to vote against it, which would let Dems get blamed for any potential shutdown. See a summary of the proposed new bill and likely politics here.
The proposal is a six-month stopgap government funding plan, with cuts to nondefense programs to below 2024 levels with a slight boots in funding for defense. Trump backs it, and Democrats are once again hopping around mad with very few options.
The plan has moderate increases to defense funding, though lower than levels previously agreed to for FY25 under a bipartisan deal struck in 2023. The bill also gives Defense flexibility to move funds around, appeasing hawks concerned with a patch and rescinds IRS funding among other treats.
In the last Congress, Democratic support was key for GOP leadership to pass funding measures in the House, due to the Republicans’ slim majority—which is even slimmer now. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said this week that Republicans are on their own to find the votes to pass the funding bill. Johnson, buoyed by the 2-vote passage of his original budget proposal, is taking the risk of going it alone.
And that’s where we are now. This is likely to be a wild week; nothing new during budgeting but of course far more chaotic and flamboyant than usual. Stay tuned; we’ll continue to update.
The shutdown of 2018-2019 was the longest in our history. Nine executive departments with almost a million employees were shut down. The CBO estimates it cost the American economy at least $11B without including indirect costs.