In a series of social media posts, Vice President JD Vance said the cost of the GOP spending bill, including the effect of the largest cuts to Medicaid in history, are “immaterial” compared to the money he says it will save through expanded funding for immigration enforcement.
“The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The (bill) fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass,” Vance said in a June 30 post on the social media site X, a few hours before he cast the tie-breaking vote to move the spending bill back to the House.
“Everything else ‒ the (Congressional Budget Office) score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy ‒ is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” he said in a second post.
Immigrants who are in the United States without legal authorization pay sales and often income taxes. They are entitled only to taxpayer-funded emergency medical care at hospitals and public education for their children.
Republicans struggled to get the bill out of the Senate and back to the House. President Donald Trump has said he wants the bill to his desk by July 4.
“I’ve seen many criticisms of the bill, and most of them fail a very basic test: could those criticisms get 50 votes?” Vance wrote in a final post. “As the president told me earlier today, for a good idea to become policy it has to have the votes. Without the votes it’s a useless idea on a piece of paper. Especially considering that if the (bill) fails, taxes go up, and ICE doesn’t get its enforcement help. The baseline here is not the status quo. The baseline is taxes go up in a few months and a lot of our progress at the border stops. Pass the bill. Pass the bill.”
The bill increases immigration enforcement spending on a scale never seen before in the United States. It authorizes $168 billion, an almost a fivefold increase from current spending on enforcement.
To pay for the increased immigration enforcement, as well as the continuation of tax rates based in Trump’s first administration that largely benefit the rich worth $2.2 trillion over the next 10 years, the bill cuts several public safety net programs.
The largest cut is $1.1 trillion to Medicaid over the next decade. It also cuts anti-poverty food assistance by $186 billion over the same timeframe. Those figures come from estimates provided by Senate committees, Joint Committee on Taxation and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Senate Republicans voted June 30 to zero out the cost of the tax cut extensions from the “baseline” cost of the legislation on the budget, a slight-of-hand move that changes on paper how much the bill costs. The Congressional Budget Office originally calculated the cost of the bill based on the fact that the Trump tax cuts passed in 2017 are set to expire.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Vance: Medicaid cuts in tax bill ‘immaterial’ compared to ICE increase
