Trump’s Treasury Pick Leaves Glaring Gap in Answer on Cutting Medicaid

Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent won’t commit to not cutting Medicaid.

In a heated back and forth Thursday with New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján, the hedge fund manager refused to specify where exactly he stood on the future of the critical health care program, claiming instead that he would leverage future negotiations on Medicaid to “empower” states.

“Yes or no: Will you recommend cutting Medicaid?” pressed Luján.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear if you said Medicaid or Medicare,” stuttered Bessent.

“Will you recommend cutting Medicaid?” the senator reiterated.

“Medicaid? The, um—I will—it’s the business of Congress to do the budget,” Bessent responded. “And I am in favor of empowering states, and I believe that for some states that will be an increase and for some states that will be a decrease.”

“So, Mr. Bessent, will you recommend cutting Medicaid to President Trump? And I’ll remind you that you acknowledged that one of your responsibilities as secretary of the Treasury will be to be providing this advice,” Luján said.

“I will get back to you on this,” Bessent concluded.

More than 72 million Americans, or roughly one in five citizens, were enrolled in Medicaid as of October, according to a federal Medicaid factsheet. The joint federal and state health care program provides comprehensive health care insurance to low-income Americans.

The wildly popular program has come under increased scrutiny by Donald Trump and his allies since his November win. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in November, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk (the potential co-chairs of the not-yet-real Department of Government Efficiency) said they intended to take a knife to “entitlement programs” such as Medicare and Medicaid, though they refused to specify how much they planned to burn from the health care programs.

That could help Trump extend his 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit, and which Bessent repeatedly vouched for and framed on Thursday as a salvation for America’s working class.

A stunning 61 Democrats on Thursday voted in favor of MAGA Representative Nancy Mace’s useless and antagonistic immigration bill. 

On its face, Mace’s so-called “Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act” doesn’t seem like a problem. The bill  “ensures predators who pose a threat and have been previously convicted of sexual assault, domestic violence and other heinous crimes are turned away or immediately deported,” the South Carolina representative wrote in an op-ed last September. 

But in reality, the bill’s aim is redundant at best. Undocumented immigrants can already be deported on account of any crimes, and about 200,000 were deported in 2023. Documented immigrants can be deported for crimes as well, including the exact grounds Mace is referring to. 

At its worst, the bill’s vague text could hurt the very people it claims it’s trying to help. Multiple groups, including the National Task Force to end Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, have come out in opposition to Mace’s bill, stating that it increases the scope of what constitutes “grounds of inadmissibility.” In effect, it would “negatively impact immigrant survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and fail to alleviate the primary barriers to safety and stability experienced by survivors seeking relief under the Immigration and Nationality Act.” 

The group went on to argue that abusers could use this potential law to accuse their victims of abuse when they actually acted in self-defense. That’s not to mention things like language barriers, fear of retaliation or arrest, a lack of knowledge of rights, and many other obstacles that could result in immigrants being hurt by this bill. 

Here are the 61 Democrats who voted for the bill regardless:

1. Boyle — Pennsylvania
2. Budzinski — Illinois
3. Bynum — Oregon
4. Clyburn —South Carolina
5. Conaway — New Jersey
6. Courtney — Connecticut
7. Craig — Minnesota
8. Cuellar — Texas
   
9. Davis — North Carolina
10. Figures — Alabama
11. Gillen — New York
12. Golden — Maine
13. Vicente Gonzalez — Texas
14. Goodlander — New Hampshire
15. Gottheimer — New Jersey
16. Gray — California
17. Harder — California
18. Hayes — Connecticut
19. Himes — Connecticut
20. Horsford — Nevada
21. Houlahan — Pennsylvania
22. Johnson — Texas
23. Kaptur — Ohio
24. Kennedy — New York
25. Khanna — California
26. Landsman — Ohio
27. Lee — Nevada
28. Levin — California
29. Lynch — Massachusetts
30. Magaziner — Rhode Island
31. Mannion — New York
32. McBride — Delaware
33. McClain Delaney — Maryland
34. McDonald Rivet — Michigan
35. Morrison — Minnesota
36. Moskowitz — Florida
37. Panetta — California
38. Pappas — New Hampshire
39. Perez — Washington
40. Riley — New York
41. Ryan — New York
42. Salinas — Oregon
43. Scholten — Michigan
44. Schrier — Washington
45. Sewell — Alabama
46. Sherrill — New Jersey
47. Sorensen — Illinois
48. Soto — Florida
49. Stanton — Arizona
50. Subramanyam — Virginia
51. Suozzi — New York
52. Swalwell — California
53. Sykes — Ohio
54. Titus — Nevada
55. Torres — New York
56. Trahan — Massachusetts
57. Tran — California
58. Vasquez — New Mexico
59. Vindman — Virginia
60. Whitesides — California

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is planning to skip out on Donald Trump’s inauguration, Politico reported Thursday.

A spokesperson for Pelosi told Politico that she would be joining other Democrats who planned to miss Monday’s festivities.

The decision is hardly surprising, considering that Pelosi has been a staunch critic of Trump, and the president-elect has lobbed plenty of accusations at her in response. Just earlier this week, Trump called her “guilty” in a rant about Jack Smith, possibly referring to his old accusations that she could be tried for treason for her involvement in his impeachment inquiry.

Pelosi isn’t the only one who has no interest in setting aside her disdain for Trump: Michelle Obama will also play hooky on Monday.

Several Democratic lawmakers will be similarly absent, including Representatives Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, and Ayanna Pressley, who said she would be “with my constituents honoring Dr. King’s legacy.”

Pelosi has made plenty of enemies on both sides of the aisle as she’s affixed herself as the power player of the Democratic establishment. Earlier this week, first lady Jill Biden expressed her disappointment in Pelosi, who had refused to fight for Joe Biden to stay in the presidential race. After Trump won, Pelosi blamed Trump’s victory on Biden’s insistence on prolonging his campaign. Last month, she successfully killed a bid from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive, to join the House Oversight Committee as ranking member.

President Joe Biden is suddenly looking for ways to keep TikTok alive in the U.S. market, despite the fact that he was the one to sign a law banning it in the first place.

“Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” a Biden official told NBC News, noting that the administration is “exploring options” to keep TikTok from going offline.

TikTok is reportedly prepared to shut down its app on Sunday, when the ban is scheduled to take effect, though the actual language of the law technically only mandates that the platform be taken off app stores to prevent new users from downloading it.

The forty-sixth president has just two days left in office before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House. Reinterpreting the law could save Biden’s final days atop the executive branch from being marred by the massively unpopular ban and effectively defer the issue to the MAGA leader.

The Supreme Court is poised to weigh on whether the law banning TikTok is constitutional. Trump filed a brief with the court last month, urging the bench to pass on ruling on the ban until he takes office, when his lawyers argue he could “pursue a political resolution that could obviate the Court’s need to decide these constitutionally significant questions.”

But Trump has not always been on TikTok’s side. Before he left office in 2020, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order. He claimed that the video-sharing platform threatened “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

Meanwhile, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will attend Trump’s inauguration, sitting on the dais alongside other Silicon Valley leaders, a Trump transition source told Axios. He will join X owner Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. All of these men have opportunistically caved to the incoming forty-seventh president’s politics since he won in November, in an apparent bid to curry the executive’s favor on the advent of a tech-centric, AI-fueled future.

Lee Zeldin, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, struggled to answer simple questions about science during his confirmation hearing Thursday.

During his hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, ranking member Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said he intended to deliver on a promise to Zeldin to ask “really basic no-tricks questions about climate change,” and Zeldin could barely answer a single one.

“First, as a matter of law, is carbon dioxide a pollutant?” Whitehouse asked.

“As far as carbon dioxide ‘emitted’ from you during that question, I would say no,” Zeldin joked. “As far as carbon dioxide that is emitted in larger masses, that we hear concern about from scientists, as well as from Congress, that’s something that certainly needs to be focused on for the EPA.”

“And as a matter of law, it is a designated pollutant, correct?” Whitehouse pressed.

“Senator, while carbon dioxide is not named as one of the six in the Clean Air Act, the EPA has been treating it as such,” Zeldin replied. Whitehouse affirmed that the Supreme Court had determined that it is a pollutant and ought to be regulated by the EPA. Zeldin appeared to treat that standard, which has been in place since 2007, with the skepticism of a technicality.

But Whitehouse was far from done administering his pop quiz. “What effect—briefly and in layman terms, I know you’re not a scientific expert—what effect are carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion having in the atmosphere?” he asked.

“Senator, while I am someone who believes strongly that we should work with the scientists, leaving science to the scientist, the policy to the policymakers, and that we all work together,” Zeldin replied.

Moments earlier, however, Zeldin had promised to “honor” the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision, which entails basically the exact opposite by upending a 40-year-old doctrine that required judges to defer to a federal agency (stocked with experts) when determining the meaning of any ambiguous laws that agency should try to enforce.

“I don’t sit before you as a scientist,” Zeldin continued. “Fortunately, at EPA we do have many talented scientists who provide that research. They have that talent to be able to tell us exactly what the metrics are of their research—”

“Just generally, and in layman’s terms, what effects do these carbon dioxide emissions have when they enter the atmosphere?” Whitehouse pressed, his head resting on his hand.

“Trapping—uh trapping heat, senator,” Zeldin said awkwardly.

The ranking member then asked the same question, this time about “methane leakage from fossil fuel production and transport,” to which Zeldin brilliantly replied, “Same.”

“What effect are carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion having in the oceans?”

“Well the emissions of greenhouse gases trap, trap heat, Senator,” Zeldin repeated, also offering that “rising sea levels are concerns where I’m from, as well.”

Whitehouse asked if it was correct that the trapped heat is “heating up the oceans.”

“That is what the scientists tell me, Senator,” Zeldin remarked. Always a good sign when someone is bothering to differentiate between what scientists tell you and what is “correct.”

“Have we hit the 1.5 degree risk threshold, and why is that important?” Whitehouse said.

Zeldin said that he would have to “defer to the talented scientists to be able to provide that advice on an ongoing basis.” (The Earth passed that threshold for the first time last year, a dangerous breach climate experts have been warning about for some time.)

Finally, Whitehouse asked Zeldin what he considered to be key climate or oceans “tipping points” that concerned him. Zeldin couldn’t name one, but said that there was concern about rising sea levels from both sides of the aisle, and its potential impact was evident on maps of places all across the country. How comforting.

In his opening statements, Whitehouse had flagged his concerns that Trump intends to pour millions into the pockets of billionaire fossil fuel barons, and that he hoped Zeldin would demonstrate an ability to “follow the science” and economics, as opposed to act as a “rubber stamp for looters and polluters.”