The Congressional Budget Office said Monday that the House Energy and Commerce Committee had exceeded its target of uncovering $880 billion in savings to be included in the reconciliation budget bill covering President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other priorities.
CBO Director Phillip Swagel wrote in a letter to the committee’s chair, Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., that the agency “estimates that the Committee’s reconciliation recommendations would reduce deficits by more than $880 billion over the [fiscal] 2025-2034 period and would not increase on-budget deficits in any year after 2034.”
The committee on Sunday night unveiled its portion of the reconciliation package ahead of a committee hearing Tuesday. The bill would include cuts to Medicaid, the health care safety net for low-income people, while rolling back Biden administration-era green energy policies.
Republican staff members on the committee told reporters Monday they would like to have a full CBO score of the bill in time for Tuesday’s hearing, but they did not anticipate it would come in time, The Hill reported. Speaker Mike Johnson has set a Memorial Day deadline for the House to pass the reconciliation package, dubbed as Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”
Democrats have been touting a CBO report released last week that they requested before the committee’s bill was final. That report estimated millions of Americans would lose Medicaid coverage under the plan. But a committee spokesperson told Newsmax on Monday that report was based on speculation.
The spokesperson said the CBO on Monday confirmed the committee met about its instructions to find $880 billion in savings and that “official scores will be ready in the coming days which will outline the exact numbers of uninsured.”
Those uninsured would come from the able-bodied who are choosing not to work; illegal immigrants who will no longer be eligible for coverage and others who are taken off the rolls because they are not eligible.
“Undoubtedly, Democrats will use this as an opportunity to engage in fearmongering and misrepresent our bill as an attack on Medicaid,” Guthrie wrote Sunday in a Wall Street Journal editorial. “In reality, it preserves and strengthens Medicaid for children, mothers, people with disabilities and the elderly — for whom the program was designed.”
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