White House adviser David Sacks admitted over the weekend that Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ will cut Medicaid, undermining weeks of spin from the administration and Republicans in Congress.
Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, said on the All-In podcast: “This bill cuts $880 billion from Medicaid over a decade,” according to Rolling Stone.
This comes as Trump and White House have insisted that there will be no cuts to Medicaid in the bill that narrowly passed the House last week.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has also said the bill does not cut Medicaid as recently as Sunday. He told CBS News that Republicans “have not cut Medicaid” and are instead focusing on making the program more efficient by eliminating “fraud, waste, and abuse.”
The bill calls for a work requirement to qualify for Medicaid coverage, a move that could result in more than 10 million Americans losing health coverage, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. The House-passed bill calls for those changes to be implemented “no later than December 31, 2026″.
The CBO also revealed that the bill will increase the debt by $2.3 trillion over 10 years. That will trigger as much as $500 billion in Medicare cuts and cuts to food stamps starting as soon as 2026.
After barely passing the House by just one vote, the bill heads to the Senate where enough Republicans have signalled that they will not support the bill in its current form.
Missouri Senator John Hawley (R) wrote in a New York Times op-ed that cutting Medicaid is “morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
