House Republican Wants Party To Boldly Own Plans To Gut The Social Safety Net

You can typically gauge just how badly Republicans want to ravage social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid upon their return to power by how much they talk on the campaign trail about how they’re not going to do that.

Trump has, throughout his political career, vacillated between utter devotion to the programs and openly musing about slashing entitlements, with his theoretical stance shifting depending on who he’s trying to appeal to at any given moment. On the campaign trail back in March, Trump let slip that he’s interested in across-the-board cuts to social safety nets, saying there’s “a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of also — the theft and the bad management of entitlements.” But as we got closer to the fall, he backtracked, saying he would not touch Medicare or Social Security, conveniently avoiding weighing in on Medicaid.

His campaign also went to great lengths to distance itself from the MAGA manifesto Project 2025 towards the end of the campaign cycle due to the extremist policies it proposed, from abortion bans to proposals to ransack the federal government. Project 2025 also puts forward significant cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.

Predictably, as soon as it became clear that Trump had secured a right-wing trifecta, whispers of “reform” to the programs returned, the language Republicans like to use to put a positive spin on their interest in slashing programs that benefit America’s most vulnerable, perhaps in order to justify tax cuts for the wealthy or, perhaps, for no real reason at all.

It started with reports of chopping-block conversations among congressional Republicans as they looked for ways to subsidize the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which primarily benefit those making $400,000 or more a year and are set to expire in early 2025. Republicans began making noise about “reforms” to Medicaid and Food Stamps programs, which, of course, serve low-income Americans who need health insurance and can’t afford basic, nutritious food.

Then Trump announced he’d nominated the failed Republican Senate candidate and surgeon-turned-TV-medical-crank Mehmet Oz to serve as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. In announcing the move he praised Oz, explaining that he would “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.”

Today, at least one House Republican is imploring his colleagues to stop with the veiled language already and just embrace the fact that the Republican Party is going to look seriously at making substantial cuts to all three programs — if the rest of the conference can buck up and “stomach” it.

“We’re going to have to have some hard decisions. We got to bring the Democrats in to talk about Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved, and we know how to do it, we just have to have the stomach to actually take those challenges on,” Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday morning, after complaining that “75 percent of the budget is nondiscretionary.”

Of course, when Bartiromo asked him the leading question of whether the defense budget should be cut as well in response, McCormick said he’s “not a big fan of that.”

“When you talk about cutting the budget, I’m all about that. And quite frankly, we need to,” he said.