GOP Rep. Lays Out Exactly How Party Will Kick People Off Medicaid

House Republicans are trying to drastically cut Medicaid coverage and blame it all on the states.

When Democrats expanded Medicaid coverage under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act to include adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level, states that implemented the expansion received a 90 percent federal medical assistance percentage, or FMAP, from the federal government. That means the federal government covers 90 percent of the costs for those enrolled in the ACA expansion, and the state covers 10 percent.

The GOP wants to drastically decrease the federal match rate for the ACA expansion and shift more financial responsibility to states, Republican Representative Austin Scott told Fox Business Tuesday.

“What we have talked about is moving that 90 percent level of the expansion back towards the more traditional levels of 50 to approximately 80 percent instead of the 90/10,” Scott said.

“Nobody would be kicked off of Medicaid as long as the governors decided that they wanted to continue to fund the program. And so we are going to ask the states to pick up and pay,” Scott said.

The cut would be devastating to the 20 million Americans who currently rely on the expansion for health insurance coverage—many of whom reside in red states—and would leave some 40 states that have adopted the ACA expansion to fend for themselves with their limited budgets. Research shows that states with the expansion have lower uninsured rates and those covered by the program have gotten healthier and more financially stable.

According to an analysis from the health nonprofit KFF, if states had to pay a higher match-rate percentage, many would likely abandon the ACA program altogether, resulting in millions of lost coverage for low-income Americans. Twelve states currently have laws in place that would end the expansion immediately or require immediate changes if the federal match rate were to drop, KFF pointed out.

“Eliminating the enhanced FMAP for adults in the Medicaid expansion could reduce Medicaid spending by nearly one-fifth ($1.9 trillion) over a 10-year period and up to nearly a quarter of all Medicaid enrollees (20 million people) could lose coverage,” the analysis found.

Led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republicans have long tried to slash the ACA expansion to help pay for Donald Trump’s tax cuts. Now the GOP is doing everything it can to avoid taking responsibility for putting the health of millions of Americans at risk.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday revealed a proposal for the largest State Department employment overhaul “in decades,” which would eliminate and restructuring entire offices in the department. Lost in the shake-up: Rubio wants to killed the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, or CSO—the agency responsible for documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine

The CSO also focuses on “conflict prevention, crisis response, and stabilization activities … driving integrated, civilian-led efforts to prevent, respond to, and stabilize crises in priority states, setting conditions for long-term peace.”*

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office notes that the CSO received $336 million between 2016 and 2023.

“Nobody is really sure what they do,” a senior State Department official told The Free Press in defense of Rubio’s decision to kill the CSO. “When I ask them, they seem to not really be sure what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s an office that was created several years ago to look at Afghanistan [issues] and to avoid conflict areas. But we already have other offices within the department that do that.”

Others, like former State Department official Brett Bruen, see the move as a politically motivated cash grab.

“It is essentially the demolishing of our international influence instruments.… The administration is trying to essentially have more discretionary funds available,” Bruen told The Washington Post last week. “They are reducing the capacity for oversight at a time when they are saying efficacy is the priority.”

* This piece has been corrected to note the State Department’s reorganization is still a proposal.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department have given DOGE access to a system that contains sensitive data on millions of legal and undocumented immigrants, including their addresses and detailed case histories, according to The Washington Post.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System, or ECAS, keeps records of everyone who’s been in the U.S. immigration system. Now six DOGE employees have permission to stick their hands in it.

DOGE has meddled in multiple different federal databases in an effort to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE is using a Medicare database to locate undocumented immigrants. The Social Security Administration is trying to force immigrants to self-deport by falsely labeling 6,000 as dead. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to prevent immigrants in mixed-status households from receiving government benefits, and the IRS is sharing migrant tax information with the Department of Homeland Security.

“It really hearkens to what we’re seeing with Social Security, with the IRS, with data that was shared with an expectation of privacy, “ National Immigration Law Center senior staff attorney Lynn Damiano Pearson told the Post. She went on to note that DOGE’s access to ECAS would have “very concerning impacts for immigrants, even ones who have specifically tried to comply with government policies and do everything right, so to speak.”

As Pete Hegseth faces a growing number of calls for his resignation post-Signalgate 2.0, the defense secretary has turned to blaming an age-old far-right enemy: the deep state.

In an interview with Fox & Friends Tuesday, the 44-year-old was asked whether there are some “deep-state forces” that want Hegseth booted from the Pentagon.

“They’ve come after me from day one,” Hegseth responded, repeating the excuse that any exposure of his own wrongdoing is just some kind of smear campaign from the left.

Chaos at the Pentagon ensued Sunday after The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared sensitive U.S. military plans about bombing the Houthis in Yemen in an unsecured Signal group chat—again. This time, the chat included his wife, brother, lawyer, and others in his personal circles.

Just hours after the Times’ report, Politico published an opinion essay by former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot detailing the department’s “full-blown meltdown” spurred by Hegseth over the last month. The frenzy has led both Democrats and Republicans to call for Hegseth’s ousting.

But Hegseth and Donald Trump are refusing to admit he did anything wrong, instead painting the defense secretary as MAGA’s latest victim in the left’s tirade against progress. “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Monday.

Hegseth too doubled down while speaking to his former news network. “I’m here because the president asked me to bring war fighting back to the Pentagon. Every single day, that is our focus,” he said.

“If people don’t like it, they can come after me. No worries. I’m standing right here. The war fighters are behind us. Our enemies know they’re on notice, our allies know we’re behind them, and that, in this dangerous world, for the American people, is what it’s all about.” It would be a much stronger rallying cry if the administration behind him wasn’t single-handedly betraying every ally the United States has.

Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs will lead to a “significant slowdown” in global growth, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

The fund said that Trump’s “reciprocal tariff” policy, announced earlier this month—which placed at least a 10 percent tariff on nearly every import to the United States—would hurt everybody, the U.S. and its trading partners alike. “This on its own is a major negative shock to growth,” the IMF said of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, in the executive summary of its April 2025 World Economic Outlook.

The U.S. now faces a depressed growth forecast in 2025, down to 1.8 percent from 2.7 percent in January, according to the fund. The IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, told reporters that the odds of a recession in the U.S. had increased from 25 percent in October 2024 to 40 percent. He said that the tariffs are a “negative supply shock for the economy imposing them.” Efforts to stymie inflation would also be undermined, the fund said.

The fund warned that the president’s radical reshaping of the U.S. economy would sink global economic expansion to an annual rate of 2.8 percent, a whopping half percentage point below what was projected in January. That rate is likely to rebound to 3 percent in 2026, but it would still be well below its average of 3.7 percent.

“The landscape has quickly changed,” said Gourinchas. “We are entering a new era as the global economic system that has operated for the last 80 years is being reset.”

The IMF serves as a lender of last resort for poorer governments, and has been the subject of some criticism over the terms of its debt-restructuring agreements, which demand austerity and privatization from borrower countries.

This newest economic outlook projection flies in the face of Trump’s repeated claims that his flurry of tariff announcements would make everyone rich, boosting the U.S. economy by crippling global supply chains to somehow promote domestic manufacturing.

Already, the effects on U.S. assets are pronounced. The stock market dropped yet again on Monday, the yield on a 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, and the ICE U.S. dollar index—which measures the dollar against foreign currencies—sank more than 1 percent to its lowest level since March 2022. Trump has continued to level attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who last week predicted that the president’s tariffs would cause inflation to rise, and refused to cut interest rates.

“THE BUSINESSMEN WHO CRITICIZE TARIFFS ARE BAD AT BUSINESS, BUT REALLY BAD AT POLITICS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday. “THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND OR REALIZE THAT I AM THE GREATEST FRIEND THAT AMERICAN CAPITALISM HAS EVER HAD!”