On Medicaid cuts, budget officials tell Republicans what they didn't want to hear
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Source: MSNBC News
March 6, 2025, 9:25 AM EST
When House Republicans advanced their far-right budget plan, congressional Democrats raised all kinds of concerns about the GOP’s misguided blueprint, but much of the focus was on one specific program: Medicaid. Republican leaders pushed back in a deeply misleading way.
“It doesn’t even mention Medicaid in the bill,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said of his party’s budget. “The word ‘Medicaid’ is not even in this bill,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise added. “This bill doesn’t even mention the word ‘Medicaid’ a single time.”
The truth wasn’t nearly that simple. While the literal text of the bill didn’t reference specific Medicaid cuts, the GOP plan directed the congressional committee that oversees Medicaid to find $880 billion in cuts that can only be found in Medicaid.
A week later, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed that Democratic criticisms were true. NBC News reported:
House Republicans can’t meet their own budget target that is necessary to pass President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda without making significant cuts to Medicare or Medicaid, the official budget scorekeeper confirmed Wednesday.
Read more: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/medicaid-cuts-budget-officials-tell-republicans-didnt-want-hear-rcna195095
Link to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) REPORT site - Mandatory Spending Under the Jurisdiction of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Link to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) REPORT (PDF) - https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-03/61235-Boyle-Pallone.pdf
As a note - when Congress does these "budget reconciliation" bills, CBO *must* "score" them for changes in revenue/outlays and impact on the deficit/debt. As they proceed, you will see more of these (unless Muskrat reaches into Congress and kills the office
).
Linked NBC story - Republicans can't meet their own budget target without cutting Medicare or Medicaid, budget office says
= new reply since forum marked as read
The reason for its creation sounds oddly familiar... 
History
Beginning in the early 1920s, the President began to assume more prominence in setting the federal budget. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 gave the President overall responsibility for budget planning by requiring him to submit an annual, comprehensive budget proposal to the Congress; that act also expanded the President’s control over budgetary information by establishing the Bureau of the Budget (renamed the Office of Management and Budget in 1971). By contrast, the Congress lacked institutional capacity to establish and enforce budgetary priorities, coordinate actions on spending and revenue legislation, or develop budgetary and economic information independently of the executive branch.
Conflict between the legislative and executive branches reached a high point during the summer of 1974, when Members of Congress objected to President Richard Nixon’s threats to withhold Congressional appropriations for programs that were inconsistent with his policies (a process known as impoundment). The dispute led to the enactment of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 in July of that year.
That act reasserted the Congress’s constitutional control over the budget by establishing new procedures for controlling impoundments and by instituting a formal process through which the Congress could develop, coordinate, and enforce its own budgetary priorities independently of the President. In addition, the law created new legislative institutions to implement the new Congressional budget process: the House and Senate Budget Committees to oversee execution of the budget process and the Congressional Budget Office to provide the Budget Committees and the Congress with objective, impartial information about budgetary and economic issues. The agency began operating on February 24, 1975, when Alice Rivlin was appointed its first Director.
(snip)
H.R.7130 - Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974
That was passed by a veto-proof majority, pretty much forcing Nixon to sign it into law (a month before he resigned).
Of course the criminal GOP "party" has been just fine with violations of this Act.
