As Republican leaders look for ways to offset the costs of a new set of tax cuts, social safety net programs are under discussion.
By Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein and Dan Diamond, The Washington PostPresident-elect Donald Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans have begun preliminary discussions about making significant changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other federal safety net programs to offset the enormous cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts next year.
The discussions center on Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which lowered taxes for the vast majority of Americans. Major portions of that law are set to expire at the end of next year, and extending those provisions - as Trump has proposed - would add more than $4 trillion to the already soaring national debt over the next decade, according to congressional bookkeepers. The debt exceeds $36 trillion now.
One influential conservative think tank, the Paragon Health Institute, published a July paper outlining some additional Medicaid changes that it said would cut federal deficits by more than $500 billion over a decade. Republicans have long denied that they are trying to reduce benefits for low-income Americans on either Medicaid or food stamps. They have framed their efforts as an attempt to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending, arguing that streamlining the programs would preserve government benefits, not penalize people who use them.
“You’ll have to see the details of what they’re proposing, but most of these achieve their savings not by stopping waste but instead by preventing eligible people from successfully signing up by creating so much red tape,” said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.
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