GOP governors stay silent amid plans to slash Medicaid spending in their states [View all]
Source: NPR
July 3, 2025 5:00 AM ET
The last time a Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald Trump moved to slash Medicaid spending, in 2017, a key political force stood in their way: GOP governors.
Now, as Congress steamrolls toward passing historic Medicaid cuts of about $1 trillion over 10 years through Trump's tax and spending legislation, red state governors are saying little publicly about what it does to health care — even as they face reductions that will punch multibillion-dollar holes in their states' budgets.
Medicaid, a program jointly run by states and the federal government, covers more than 70 million low-income or disabled people, including nearly half of the nation's children. Republicans say the $900 billion-a-year program was allowed to grow too large under Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden by adding nondisabled adults they say don't deserve government assistance, and they have long sought to scale it back.
Some of the biggest health cuts in the legislation Trump calls the "One Big Beautiful Bill" are achieved through new policies that would reduce enrollment by imposing more paperwork demands on enrollees, including a requirement that many prove they're working. Those policies would affect only states that expanded Medicaid to more low-income people under the Affordable Care Act. Nineteen of those states are led by Republican governors. Their silence on the bill's health measures is giving political cover to GOP lawmakers from their states as they seek to cut Medicaid coverage for millions of people who gained it within the last decade.
Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/03/nx-s1-5455058/gop-governors-medicaid-cuts-trump-tax-bill
It's gonna blow holes in GOP budgets.
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