Congress
Medicare is a target as Senate GOP faces megabill math issues
Senate Republicans are eyeing possible Medicare provisions to help offset the cost of their megabill as they try to appease budget hawks who want more spending cuts embedded in the legislation.
Making changes to Medicare, the federal health insurance program primarily serving seniors, would be a political longshot: It would face fierce backlash from some corners of the Senate GOP, not to mention across the Capitol, where Medicare proposals were floated but didn’t gain traction.
But Senate Republicans are now seriously considering it as they race to pass their party-line tax and spending package before a self-imposed July 4 deadline. The idea came up in closed-door meetings this week and, crucially, some Republicans believe President Donald Trump is on board with touching the program as long as it’s limited to “waste, fraud and abuse.”
“I think anything that is waste, fraud and abuse are obviously open to discussions,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Thursday when asked about Medicare.
Cracking down on some smaller areas of the vast program could net significant savings for Senate Republicans. The other main area they’re planning to tap is ratcheting down the House-negotiated state-and-local-tax-deduction cap – as Thune first acknowledged to POLITICO Tuesday. Both are politically explosive areas that will trigger serious blowback in the House.
“I think the focus, as you know, has been on addressing waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid,” Thune added when pressed on Medicare. “But right now we’re open to suggestions if people have them about other areas where there is clearly waste, fraud and abuse that can be rooted out in any government program.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who was among the Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee who went to the White House Wednesday to meet with Trump about the tax portion of their megabill, told reporters he believed the president was more amenable to making Medicare changes than he might have previously let on.
“I think the president is actually open to any elimination of any waste, fraud and abuse … wherever,” he said, though added that Trump “doesn’t want to cut benefits.”
Finance Committee Republicans wanted to use their audience with Trump to press their case for making certain business tax incentives permanent, but a significant chunk of the conversation instead focused on senators pitching their individual ideas for how to inject more savings into their version of the House-passed bill.
A band of House moderates is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of touching Medicare in the megabill, even if it is in the name of “waste, fraud and abuse.” Speaker Mike Johnson said in a brief interview Thursday that he wouldn’t “address hypotheticals.”
But he reiterated he doesn’t want to inject any more major political fights into the already fractious talks. Johnson said the House GOP’s “work reflects more than a year of very careful and deliberate discussion and ideas and so, you know, we’re very satisfied with the product we’ve sent over there, and I hope they’ll change it as little as possible.”
Some House lawmakers briefly floated the idea of overhauling Medicare Advantage — which enables older Americans to buy private plans offering health coverage — to garner savings. Critics have accused Medicare Advantage plans of using financial gamesmanship to increase federal payments, but targeting the program would likely draw the ire of the insurance industry.
The search for more cuts comes as GOP senators look for areas where they can go beyond the House’s $1.6 trillion in cuts. But the push is being complicated because some Senate committees, including the Agriculture panel, are likely to scale back the savings found by their House counterparts.
Leadership is pushing the Agriculture Committee to net $150 billion in cuts as they work to scale down a controversial House plan to shift billions in food aid costs to states, according to four Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. That’s half of the $300 billion in agriculture cuts from the House bill, and GOP senators are still trying to fit in a $70 billion farm bill package.
As part of an effort to generate more savings, Republicans have floated several ideas related to Medicaid, including tightening the House’s work requirements and trying to roll back — not just freeze — the use of state provider taxes. Both of those ideas would face their own block of opposition within the Senate GOP.
But they also raised Medicare as part of a lengthy debate Senate Republicans had among themselves Wednesday, when they met first with CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and subsequently got briefed by the chairs of the Armed Services, Banking and Commerce Committees on their pieces of the megabill.
“There was legitimate debate about: Can we do more with Medicaid? Are we doing too much with Medicaid? How much waste, fraud, abuse is there in Medicare — why don’t we go after that? I think we should,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said about the discussion Wednesday.
Asked if there was any consideration of including Medicare as part of the megabill, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) said, “There is on the Senate Republican side.”
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) is jumping into the race to lead House education committee Democrats.
The Oregon Democrat officially declared she will run to be the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee in a Dear Colleague letter sent to members of the Democratic caucus Tuesday and shared with Blue Light News.
Bonamici’s jump into the race marks another challenger for Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the panel’s current ranking member. Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) is also running for the panel’s top spot.
Bonamici wrote in the letter that she is “ready to bring a fresh and collaborative approach to invigorate this Committee with a plan to champion the education and labor priorities of our Caucus. With my legal background, I’m prepared to use all of the power of Congress to hold Trump and his cronies, including Secretary Linda McMahon, accountable for the harm they have caused.”
Bonamici introduced a resolution to impeach the Education secretary because of McMahon’s efforts to dismantle the department without the approval of Congress.
Tuesday’s announcement comes after Bonamici told POLITICO last month that she was not ruling out a run for committee leadership and was having conversations about it. Her leadership run now comes as Democrats believe they will win the House majority in November.
The Oregon Democrat, who currently serves as top Democrat on the K-12 subcommittee, said the whole panel “must provide a bold and visionary approach while fighting Trump’s corruption and assault on public education, unions, and working families” if they take the majority.
BETHLEHEM, Pennsylvania — Speaker Mike Johnson defended President Donald Trump’s use of taxpayer funded political-themed ads ahead of the election, but he said it was “good” that MAGA Inc. would pay for them going forward.
Johnson said Tuesday that he’s only seen one of the Trump ads and that it “looked like a public service announcement.”
“It was talking about America’s greatness and the economy coming back, and it wasn’t a plea to vote for anybody. It was just — it was pro Americana,” Johnson told Blue Light News during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania.
But he added: “If the Super PAC’s funding them, that’s good.”
Trump said Monday that he or his aligned super PAC would pay for the series of taxpayer-funded ads featuring him in the final few weeks of the midterms. His decision came after bipartisan backlash, including from some GOP candidates like Brinker Harding in Nebraska’s 2nd District publicly broke with the president and said they shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer money.
Still, asked if Trump should refund taxpayers the money already spent on the ads, Johnson demurred. He said previous Democratic administrations have run PSAs as well, though Democrats argue these ads violate federal laws against using taxpayer money for “publicity or propaganda purposes.”
“Look, they’re making their decisions on funding campaigns and the content of all of it,” Johnson said of the president’s team.
“I’m going to tell you the president is deeply vested,” Johnson added, noting Trump was out on the campaign trail for Republicans.
Johnson spoke alongside Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.) during a law enforcement event in the perennial bellwether of Pennsylvania’s 7th District. He called Mackenzie’s race one of the “top three in the country” and warned it would be “enormously expensive.”
He later argued that Democrats, if they win the House majority, would roll back GOP work on the economy and “empower our enemies around the world at the worst possible time.”
“That would roil the markets … if Democrats turned Congress into lawfare on steroids,” Johnson said.
Pennsylvania is the first of seven states that Johnson plans to visit this week as he continues his midterm campaign blitz.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said he plans to stay on the court through next year, brushing aside speculation that he could retire early and let President Donald Trump fill his seat after the election but before a new Congress is sworn in next year.
“I intend to stick around through this term,” Alito, 76, said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “I made that decision many months ago.”
The Supreme Court began its new term on Monday, which will last through next June.
Alito, the second-oldest justice on the bench, was in the news last week after telling CBS News that he considered retiring this year and will do so again in 2027.
His comments come as the fight over control of the Senate is in a dead heat. Democrats would have to flip at least four seats, but recent polls show several races, including in states Trump carried easily two years ago, remain competitive.
Several Senate Democratic candidates are already running on the prospect of filling a seat on the Supreme Court or, at least, denying Trump’s ability to do so. Senate Republicans successfully blocked a Democratic nominee in 2016, allowing Trump to fill the seat after he came into the White House.
“Our race to decide Ohio’s next Senator could not only determine control of the U.S. Senate, but also who fills a lifetime seat on the highest court in the land,” Sherrod Brown, the Democratic nominee in Ohio, wrote in a blog post Monday. “Ohio’s next senator could be our first line of defense against another partisan Supreme Court Justice — or rubber stamp a Trump nominee.”
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