February 19, 2025: House GOP Moves on Trump’s Agenda While Musk’s Attacks on Working Families Continue
This morning, President Trump threw his support behind the House GOP’s plan to advance his legislative agenda, prompting House Republican leadership to announce a key vote next week. Below, we’ll walk through what could happen next and how Congress’ moves relate to Elon Musk’s attacks on services communities depend on. But first…
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Trump backs House plan to gut Medicaid and SNAP to fund corporate tax breaks
As a reminder: congressional Republicans aim to use a process known as reconciliation to renew and expand corporate-friendly tax policies from the first Trump Administration; greenlight hundreds of billions of dollars for the military and deportations; and defund programs like Medicaid, which provides health care to more than 70 million Americans. To learn more about this process, check out The Basics of Budget Reconciliation.
Right now, the House and Senate—while both GOP-controlled—favor different paths to enacting that agenda. Each chamber’s budget committee approved its respective proposal last week on a party-line vote.
You can read more details about the Senate’s proposal here, and the House’s here, but below is a quick rundown on how the options differ:
The Senate’s proposal tees up a two-bill approach to reconciliation, while the House aims to do just one. For more on why that matters, see our January 10 update.
The House proposal makes room for massive tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The Senate’s proposal does not.
The House aims to spend a lot more than the Senate does ($4.8 trillion in the House vs. $521 billion in the Senate). Again, this is largely because of taxes.
The House’s proposed cuts are way bigger than the Senate’s ($1.5 trillion with a goal of $2 trillion in the House vs. at least $4 billion in the Senate).
The House wants to raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. The Senate’s proposal doesn’t touch the debt ceiling.
What would the House GOP plan do?
In a nutshell: the budget blueprint House Republicans unveiled last week would defund Medicaid and food assistance to pay for trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the mega-rich and corporations.
Below are just a few of the impacts this could have for American families.
36 million Americans or more could lose their Medicaid health insurance coverage. Data shows that about two-thirds of people who lose Medicaid coverage experience some period without any health insurance in the year that follows. That means more than 20 million people could find themselves without insurance entirely if they’re in an accident or face a cancer diagnosis.
More than 40 million Americans could see their SNAP assistance (food stamps) shrink, with many losing assistance altogether. Two-thirds of people receiving SNAP assistance are in families with children, and data shows that by making it easier for people to afford healthy food, SNAP has a lasting, positive impact on those kids’ long-term health. However, kids who lose even some of their SNAP benefits become more likely to skip medical care as their families try to make ends meet.
Defunding Medicaid and SNAP affects people who don’t use those programs. Even folks who don’t participate in SNAP or have Medicaid coverage could feel these cuts’ effects. For example, states might seek to continue covering people enrolled in Medicaid—but to do so, they’ll need to raise taxes or cut spending elsewhere to shift resources to Medicaid coverage. That, in turn, means folks who aren’t enrolled in SNAP or Medicaid could see higher tax bills or less state investment in education.
What happens now?
The Senate GOP was poised to move its plan to a vote in the full Senate tomorrow. However, President Trump endorsed the House’s approach this morning, which could prompt Senate Republican leaders to reconsider their plans.
Without getting too into the procedural weeds, tomorrow’s vote would have forced Senate Republicans to take a lot of votes that could be politically harmful. The reconciliation process makes those kinds of votes inevitable (more on why in The Basics of Budget Reconciliation). But it’s one thing to take tough votes to advance a proposal that’s likely to be signed into law—the tradeoff calculus changes a bit when the President says he likes another option better. So, keep an eye out for a change of plans on the Senate side.
This does not mean the House GOP’s plan is a done deal
Reporting indicates that “at least double digits” of House Republicans are wary of voting for their leaders’ budget proposal on the House floor—the next step in this process—given the massive cuts on the table for programs their constituents depend on, like Medicaid. But House GOP leadership can’t afford those defections: if every current House member is voting and every House Democrat opposes the GOP budget proposal, Republicans can lose at most one GOP vote.
Now that President Trump has publicly thrown his support behind the House proposal, there will be added pressure on Republicans who are still on the fence to get in line behind the President’s agenda. Whether enough of them do remains to be seen—and even then, positions can change. I say that because this isn’t the first time there has been House GOP unease about backing Trump’s agenda, particularly around health care.
In 2017, the GOP-controlled House had to call off its first attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) given some Republicans’ refusal to back the bill—only for enough of those members to flip and get ACA repeal through the House just over a month later. But, of course, that still wasn’t the end of the story for ACA repeal.
I raise this example to underscore that there may be lots of fits and starts ahead—even when it might seem like the GOP’s agenda is on a glide path, be it to victory or defeat.
A multi-pronged attack on working families
Republicans in Congress are setting out to defund programs like Medicaid to fund tax giveaways to billionaires and corporations while President Trump and his mega-donor, Elon Musk, are laying waste to services families depend on so our government works in their interest.
These parallel efforts will have the same result: a government that serves the mega-rich, not working families.
Take, for example, Trump’s firing of National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the Board unable to effectively penalize employers who violate workers’ rights. Preventing the Board from upholding workers’ rights benefits Musk, as the Board was leading two dozen investigations into his companies—but it also makes it easier for corporations to put off recognizing unions, illegally fire workers for organizing, and more. For more details, check out What is the crisis at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)?
Just like defunding Medicaid to pay for corporate tax breaks, attacks on watchdogs that keep those corporations in check have real, harmful consequences for working people. We’ll continue to share information about what the White House and Congress’ next steps might be, and what they mean for you.
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