Federal budget update - still nothing close to decided

Not that this should surprise anyone, but when Republicans say their budget plans don't cut Medicaid, they are claiming something that is literally impossible. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed it this week (read the report here if you want).

Here is CBO confirming the obvious. To meet House budget resolution's target that Energy and Commerce Committee make at least $880 billion in mandatory spending cuts and Medicare is excluded, deep #Medicaid cuts are absolutely necessary as there isn't much other spending. www.cbo.gov/publication/...

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— Edwin Park (@edwincpark.bsky.social) March 5, 2025 at 4:24 PM

And the Wisconsin Medicaid Coaliton gave a quick summary of what those numbers translate to.

The CBO analysis finds the committee has only $581 Billion in spending that is not Medicaid or Medicare. Congressional leadership has long promised no cuts to Medicare which would mean a minimum of $299 Billion in cuts to Medicaid, and only if it made deep cuts to other safety net programs. In fact, eliminating every program besides safety net programs only adds up to $135 Billion.

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Budget Resolution that commits the House to $2 Trillion in cuts, with at least $880 Billion in cuts assigned to committee covering Medicaid. Based on previous proposals from House Budget Committee Republican leadership, the $880 Billion in cuts are widely anticipated to come from the Medicaid program.

Remember that what passed the House wasn’t any type of specifics, but an outline of a budget with total numbers, and the committees that would figure out the details. If the Senate were to agree to this budget resolution (which they haven’t yet), then we’d have to get into the actual programs and specific programs that get cut to make the US budget match up with those numbers, or at least the same amount of deficit.

As a reminder, here are the required changes in all the committees to match up to the budget resolution of $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years.

So, each committee will write legislation that adheres to the instructions set in the budget resolution. Here's what the House budget resolution calls for:

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— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) February 25, 2025 at 7:22 PM

The Senate passed its own budget resolution in February that would have increased spending on macho Trumpian stuff like border security and defense, and planned to wait until later to do the taxing and budget cuts part. But it now seems that they will try to jam everything into one mess of a bill, although any Senate outline that gets revealed won’t come out for a while.

Senate Republicans adopted a budget reflecting their desired, two-bill strategy, which would have put the tax changes in a separate bill later this year. They are now switching to the one-bill track, but not before they address necessary changes to the House product to pass muster with their members.

The Senate Finance Committee, Thune noted, has quietly been socializing ideas with Senate Republicans on the tax piece and Senate Republicans are expected to talk about the House budget during their own closed-door lunches this week. It will mark the first chance leadership will have to take the temperature of the whole group at once.

Senate GOP leadership staff also briefed senior Senate Republican staffers during a meeting on Monday, indicating that they were still in the very early stages of ironing out a deal on the House budget resolution. Senate Republicans hold multiple staff meetings, which are run by leadership offices, at the start of every week.

While Senate Republicans grapple privately with the House budget resolution, Senate Republicans are expected to focus floor activity next week on a much closer deadline: funding the government.

Oh yeah, there’s that too!

The government shutdown deadline is looming for a week from Friday, and deals with the current year budget, to allow spending for the next 6 1/2 months. It is not the 2026 budget that would have the Medicaid cuts and GOP's tax giveaways in it. While House Speaker Mike Johnson says he plans for a vote on Tuesday to avoid a shutdown, let’s see if that actually happens.

If not, it could quite a different case of March Madness up on Capitol Hill next week. And we'd better not see one Dem vote for anything put up by the GOP until the unauthorized dweebs at DOGE and Elon Musk are driven out of DC, because otherwise we can't guarantee that our tax dollars will go anywhere other than the pockets of the crooks getting 6 figures to make things more inefficient in DC, and to screw things up for everyday Americans.