The Budget Blueprint Is No 'Big, Beautiful Bill'

At best, it’s a concept of a plan. But then they’ll try to spin it to voters.

U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) leaves after the House passed the Republican's budget resolution on the spending bill. Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images.

You’ve probably heard the news. On Tuesday evening, the House GOP narrowly passed a budget resolution by a vote of 217 to 215, with only one GOP member (Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a deficit hawk) voting with the Democrats.

Based on worried reader comments and the crowing of GOP members busily spreading misinformation, you’d think the budget had been sealed, along with the fate of programs like Medicaid, and delivered to Trump for his signature.

Not so.

The resolution that passed is just a blueprint. That is to say, it gives instructions on how to move forward with the full budget, including instructions to House committees to find cuts that fit within the blueprint.

It also has to line up with a companion bill from the Senate that does the same basic things.

That means we are still a very long way from the enactment of tax cuts for the uber-wealthy and draconian cuts to government health services in places like Medicaid. And that means we have time to mobilize and see the budget go down to defeat, just like we have seen every other GOP budget bill fail over the past two years.

So let’s unpack what the budget blueprint is and what it isn’t. We will also track its next steps to understand where it is vulnerable to public pressure, especially when it comes to votes from Congress members in critical swing districts where there are many recipients of Medicaid.

No, no, we won’t touch Medicaid!

To hear many Republicans say it, they have no plans to gut Medicaid. For example, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who is from a “blue dot” district in his state, told reporters that he’s “asked the House leadership to prove to us that $880 billion in cuts won’t overly cut Medicaid.”

Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) chimed in. “I’ve made clear to House leadership that I will only support a final bill that protects essential resources like Medicaid or SNAP for Central Valley families,” Valado said.

In fact, a group of GOP members from purple districts, including Valadao, warned in a letter to House leadership last week that “slashing Medicaid would have serious consequences, particularly in rural and predominantly Hispanic communities.”

Yet all of these GOP House members voted for the blueprint, which Democrats have been saying for weeks will gut Medicaid and other critical government support programs for the poor.

So how are they getting away with saying one thing and then voting for the other?

The whole tooth and nothing but the tooth

No one should be surprised by this, but Republicans are trying to pull a procedural sleight of hand and fool their constituents into thinking that they didn’t vote for the thing they said they wouldn’t vote for.

Here’s how they’re doing it. The budget blueprint doesn’t actually mention Medicaid. It only talks about how much government spending needs to be cut in order to make the blueprint work. Then it gives instructions to House committees to make it happen.

Let’s get down to the hard numbers for a moment. The blueprint calls for a total of $2 trillion in spending reductions to offset tax cuts that benefit primarily the most wealthy Americans. Of those cuts, $880 billion, or around 44 percent, fall within the purview of a single committee, the House Energy and Commerce Committee (E&C).

The Times showed it this way:

It’s the E&C’s job to find the dark red part: $880 billion in cuts.

If the GOP’s budget blueprint were a mold for a new set of teeth for the wealthy donor class, then think of the instructions to the E&C to find $880 billion in cuts like handing a pair of pliers to an evil dentist.

“The patient is in that room, strapped to a chair,” Republicans essentially said to the E&C. “We’re not telling you how to do it, but we need a couple of new front teeth for these new dentures for our donor masters. Let us know when it’s done.”

The fact is, telling the E&C to find $880 billion dollars to cut, when pretty much their entire budget is Medicare and Medicaid, gives them no choice but to forcibly yank out some teeth.

How will they extract those teeth?

The New York Times was out with another graphic that demonstrates how the E&C has few options except to cut Medicaid or Medicare.

If we treat each box below as $250 billion in gross mandatory spending over the next ten years, the budget overseen by the E&C looks like this:

You can see that even if the E&C cut all non-health spending, that would still leave around another $600 billion to cut.

So what is the E&C going to do? Well, it could gut the Children’s Health Insurance Program. There’s $200 billion there, but it would be a devastating blow to poorer families, and that is proving to be an even more radioactive idea than cutting Medicaid. “Cutting insurance for kids” doesn’t play well to voters, it seems. So it’s pretty much off the table, too, and has never even been raised by GOP leadership as an option.

So it’s pretty much cuts to Medicaid after all. And the GOP knows it.

What would the impact be?

Reductions in Medicaid could negatively impact some 72 million Americans, many of whom are working adults already close to the poverty line.

Medicaid covers nearly half of all births in the country, including 64 percent of all births in a poor state like Louisiana. Indeed, mothers in poorer Southern states would be most deeply impacted by cuts to maternal health.

Medicaid also covers around two-thirds of all nursing home stays. According to the nonprofit health policy research organization KFF, Medicaid was the primary payer for 63 percent of nursing facility residents in 2024. Medicare picked up some 13 percent, and only around a quarter were paid for through private insurance or out-of-pocket.

Are poorer families prepared to skip the hospital when the baby is due? Or go pick up granny from the nursing home and bring her home to live?

The cuts will also devastate struggling hospitals, particularly in rural areas. And it will deal a huge blow to state budgets, where federal Medicaid funding often plays a key role.

The GOP lies have already begun

Within moments after the vote on Tuesday night, Republicans were actively misrepresenting what had just passed. They’re doing so in order to help gain support for a budget that they know will be wildly unpopular with voters everywhere.

For example, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) posted after the close House vote that they were “PASSING RECONCILIATION!” (not true, it’s just a budget blueprint, not a formal tax and spending bill) and that the bill has “no tax” on tips or overtime and “tax relief for seniors” among other falsehoods.

After Luna was Community Noted—because none of that was actually in the bill—she deleted the post. But there are many other posts with similar false information that remain up, including more from Luna herself as well as Rep. Lauren Boebert. The GOP disinformation machine rolls on.

As discussed above, the blueprint has no specifics. It’s just a broad outline for tax cuts, spending cuts, and a resulting rise in the deficit because the tax cuts outweigh the spending cuts. A dozen House Committees will have to now find how to give tax cuts and make spending cuts, and they will have a very hard time doing so.

So how will Republicans sell these cuts to their voters?

The Trojan Horse of “fraud, waste, and abuse”

It’s a tried and true move for autocratic governments. To lock up their enemies and assert power over government agencies and power centers, they claim that they need to go in with a flamethrower to burn out “fraud, waste and abuse” in the government.

Vladimir Putin sent his main political rival, Alexei Navalny, to prison over trumped-up charges of fraud. He died there last year. Xi Jinping is known to accuse political rivals of corruption. In the hands of a dictatorial government, the cudgel of “fraud, waste, and abuse” can be a powerful one.

After all, who could be opposed to that? Isn’t corruption and inefficiency bad? Shouldn’t we want to expunge it?

There are two basic ways to do this.

The first is the normal, democratic way. You could enshrine ethical standards; elevate independent inspector generals; protect whistleblowers; and require periodic, outside audits of books. This method follows norms and the rule of law and results in widespread compliance, even within large organizations.

The second is the Trump/Musk way. Ignore rules and safeguards, fire the inspectors general, expose the whistleblowers, and send young hackers into the computer systems instead of forensic auditors. This method is not designed to root out fraud, waste, or abuse but rather to hand unregulated power to the unaccountable. This allows them to accomplish undemocratic agendas, all in the name of efficiency and anti-corruption campaigns.

You can already hear the GOP gearing up to cast any cuts to Medicaid as part of a campaign to eliminate “fraud, waste, and abuse.” Speaker Mike Johnson loves to come back to this theme. On Wednesday, a reporter confronted him directly:

REPORTER: Can you say unequivocally that, further down the line, there won't be cuts to Medicaid programs?

JOHNSON: Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud, waste and abuse.

Here’s Trump’s new Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, making the false distinction between those who “deserve” the social safety net while vowing to get rid of “all that crap of waste, fraud, and abuse.” He added, “That’s out of here.”

Trump is messaging similarly, promising on the one hand not to touch government social safety nets even while carving out a possible big exception for fraud, waste, and abuse. "Look, Social Security won't be touched, other than if there's fraud or something. It's going to be strengthened. But it won't be touched,” Trump said to Sean Hannity of Fox.

It bears saying now that there is not $880 billion worth of fraud, waste, or abuse within the Medicaid system. But false claims, along with hyper-amplification of edge cases, will inevitably power the GOP narrative around cutting Medicaid benefits, just as it did with inflated stories about “Welfare Queens” decades ago when they wanted to slash government assistance programs.

We are seeing a version of this play out now with DOGE. They are inside systems ostensibly looking around for “fraud, waste and abuse” while Elon Musk makes up stories out of whole cloth, such as $50 million in condoms for Gaza, a claim he was forced to retract. DOGE members are even misrepresenting data, including the value of a contract worth $8 million into one worth $8 billion to make their accomplishments appear stronger. And they are smearing federal workers as lazy mooches, when they are in fact some of the hardest working among us, as the Washington Post noted in a recent report.

We should not be surprised, and we should be ready with receipts when the GOP begins to claim its deep cuts to Medicaid are designed to prevent “lazy” people from collecting benefits without working or that there are fraudsters taking advantage of the system. They need to justify these devastating cuts, and they have already settled on a false and cynical basis for doing so.

An uncertain road ahead

The fate of the budget blueprint is by no means assured. The next step in the process is for the Senate to conform its current budget bill to the House version. That would unlock the process of reconciliation in the committees so that a bill could ultimately emerge to be voted upon.

But some GOP senators have concerns about the House version.

For those who want bigger, more lasting tax cuts, the bill doesn’t go far enough. They would like to see the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy not just be extended but become permanent. To get to that higher number, they will either need far deeper cuts to social services or a much bigger budget deficit.

That in turn has budget hawks, who are worried about exploding deficits, concerned.

We will need to wait to see what the approved version of the budget blueprint ultimately looks like, as that depends completely on negotiations between the House and the Senate. Any version that explodes the deficit even more than the current one could lose support from anti-deficit conservatives. But one that cuts too deeply into Medicaid to make the numbers work could lose support among swing district House members or from senators in states with large numbers of Medicaid recipients.

A big test of GOP unity will come soon. By March 14, Congress must pass another resolution to continue to fund the government, or it will shut down. While Democrats have in the past been willing to provide votes to keep the government operating, that was in large part because it stayed open under the terms of the budget set by the Democrats during the first part of Biden’s term.

Now that it’s clear the GOP intends to make deep cuts to Medicaid in order to fund tax cuts for the rich, and that the administration has seized power by impounding billions in congressionally appropriated funds, the GOP may find the Democrats to be far less interested in helping.

Indeed, if the Democrats do not lift a finger to help, the GOP will have to come together with near unanimity on spending just to keep the doors of government open. Radical House Freedom Caucus members could easily seize this opportunity to hold the government hostage unless leadership agrees to deep spending cuts, which could in turn cause a revolt among swing district Republicans.

In short, budget blueprint or no, the GOP still has to govern. And we know from experience that they are terrible at it. They will seek to pin any government shutdown on the Democrats, but the messaging here is simple: The GOP controls all branches of government, so it’s up to them to keep the doors open and the lights on. Democrats can’t agree to clean up the GOP’s messes anymore, especially while the White House keeps funds frozen and the GOP plans to hurt the poorest among us in order to benefit the richest.

In sum, House Republicans may have a budget blueprint, but they still don’t have a politically viable way to build what it demands.

As Trump would say, it’s “a concept of a plan.”

And as Joe Biden would respond, “Good luck in your senior year.”