Not holding Trump officials in contempt? Just one reason not to pass the House budget
The U.S House budget would cost 8.6 million people Medicaid coverage, the Congressional Budget Office reports, and trigger roughly $490 billion in Medicare cuts. Other provisions include: cuts to SNAP and green energy tax credits; a 10-year prohibition on states restricting Artificial Intelligence, and a tax break for purchasing gun silencers.
Perhaps most insidiously, the bill makes it difficult for courts to hold administration officials in contempt. Multiple judges are currently considering contempt citations against administration officials. These citations provide a check on executive power. Without them, our president becomes a king. We must let our senators know they must not pass this bill.
Helen Wolfson, Durham
I applaud the NCDOT trying to be environmentally sensitive when it comes to sourcing the tremendous amount of rock needed to rebuild I-40 through the Pigeon River Gorge. It is also worth mentioning this crisis presents an opportunity to install needed wildlife road crossings along that interstate stretch, as Safe Passage Coalition called for.
Enlarging the existing creek culverts to allow bear, deer and elk to cross under the highway would be a triple win: it helps the wildlife survive, it improves motorist safety (hitting a 500-lb bear or 1000-lb elk isn't fun!) and it would also help those culverts and the highway survive hurricanes.
Ron Sutherland, chief scientist at Wildlands Network, Durham
I've lived in Raleigh, on and off, since 1962. Then, graffiti wasn't much of an issue. For years, the city has had ordinances requiring property owners to clean up graffiti. Today, graffiti and tagging are nearly everywhere, often linked to gangs or people trying to create that impression.
Given the wide availability of affordable graffiti removal methods — like soda blasting, which doesn't damage the underlying paint — why doesn't Raleigh invest in mobile cleanup? A city-operated van equipped with eco-friendly cleaning tools, color-matching technology like what's used at Lowe's and a lift cage could make a huge difference.
A dedicated employee, perhaps even a police officer for safety, seems like a smart investment. For under $200,000 annually, Raleigh could maintain cleaner streets, support property owners and discourage criminal activity. It's time for Raleigh to be more proactive. A cleaner Raleigh is a safer, more welcoming place.
Jarles Alberg, Raleigh
The federal debt is a mess. An annual deficit makes paying our debt harder. As a former business owner, we should pay our debt and balance our budget as Congress is attempting. The budget proposal passed by the U.S. House takes a hatchet to clean energy tax credits.
Companies rely on these credits to plan for the future, allowing them to create good-paying jobs and build factories, such as the Boviet Solar plant that opened in Pitt County. Toyota announced it will expand its Randolph County plant, investing almost $14 billion.
The House budget would eliminate many of the credits these companies relied on to bring investments. This will cause economic uncertainty and could spark divestment in under-invested areas. I served as a Fayetteville councilor for 10 years and am well aware the government must be fiscally responsible. I hope our senators will fight for our communities and keep these jobs and investments safe.
Bobby Hurst, Fayetteville
Without Medicare, healthcare or food stamps, children will get hungry, sick or, worst, die. Our children are the future of this nation. Without them there's no future.
Micheal Wilson, Raleigh
Responding to the May 21 op-ed, 'At least 6 NC species face severe threats from new Trump administration proposal,' 28 N.C. native plants are federally listed as endangered in addition to 345 state-listed species, which includes 944 nationally-listed.
Rare plants are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss because many only occur in specialized habitats, often overrun by invasive species, or succumb to habitat loss from land conversion. Many animals have some ability to move, but plants do not (outside of seed and/or fruit dispersal), which is further limited in our modern world.
Plants create the habitat within which most animals live and are the basis of food chains and webs. Do not ignore the plight of rare flora in what is often an animal-based perspective sometimes referred to as 'plant blindness.'
Johnny Randall, former director of conservation at North Carolina Botanical Garden, Chapel Hill
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MAHA adviser: Report's citation errors ‘great disservice' to Trump, RFK Jr.
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The latest GOP push to cut waste and spending: Work requirements
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans are increasingly turning to work requirements as part of a wide-ranging effort to slash spending on welfare benefits - extending GOP messaging around waste and fraud to argue that many people who get federal aid don't deserve it. In late May, the House passed a sweeping tax and budget bill that would impose new work requirements as part of a plan to cut Medicaid. The Agriculture Department is poised to broaden work requirements that already condition access to the nation's largest food assistance program. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development sees work requirements as an 'absolute priority' for rental assistance programs - possibly within President Donald Trump's first year in office - according to an official briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that aren't finalized. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. Specific policies could change as the bill heads to the Senate, where multiple Republicans have expressed concerns over work requirements for Medicaid. Yet the proposals reflect a shifting view among Republicans in Washington about who should receive federal benefits. In a New York Times op-ed last month, four top Trump officials overseeing housing, health and food programs wrote that welfare programs were created to help the neediest but have 'deviated from their original mission both by drift and by design.' Even able-bodied adults should look to welfare as a 'short-term hand-up, not a lifetime handout,' wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner. Meanwhile, Republican House leaders are also linking work requirements to broader efforts to root out fraud and abuse, and prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing public benefits. 'There are vulnerable citizens of this country who depend on the safety net,' House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told The Washington Post last month. 'The safety net is weakened and is less sustainable when you are allowing these monies to go to people or to stakeholders … and used in other ways outside of supporting those who need it, depend on it and qualify for it.' The proposals have drawn sharp criticism from Democrats and left-leaning economists, who argue that work requirements are the wrong tool for this economy. They say the policies risk dropping some of the most vulnerable benefits recipients - such as people who work inconsistent hours, go through bouts of unemployment, struggle with health issues that don't qualify as disabilities or do unpaid work caring for relatives. 'We have never required a 64-year-old single widow who's taking care of her grandchild to work in order to be able to receive SNAP benefits,' said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, referring to the food assistance program for low-income families. 'And I guess that's going to change.' Work requirements for benefits programs have been pushed at various times over decades. President Bill Clinton campaigned on a promise to 'end welfare as we know it' and in 1996 worked with the Republican-controlled Congress to overhaul benefits in a landmark law. The measure ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children - which effectively entitled the poorest Americans to federal help - and introduced Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, known more commonly as TANF. The number of people receiving federal welfare payments fell by half in four years, to 6.3 million in 2000. And the past few decades have given rise to debates over whether the changes worked, especially since measures of poverty fluctuate with recessions and other economic forces. The new policies under consideration could be even more far-reaching. Under the Affordable Care Act, adults with low incomes and no children or disabilities qualified for Medicaid for the first time, marking a significant expansion of the safety net insurance program. The new Republican plan would require beneficiaries to spend at least 80 hours a month working, training for a job, in school or volunteering to qualify for Medicaid. In May, Kennedy, the health and human services secretary, told the Senate that the changes would primarily affect people fraudulently receiving benefits and 'able-bodied male workers, males, who refuse to get a job.' Work requirements are meant to reduce the number of people on the program: Roughly a third of the $800 billion in health-care savings in the GOP's sweeping tax bill would come from the work rules, which would result in 4.8 million people becoming uninsured, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported by The Washington Post's Fact Checker. SNAP, the nation's largest food assistance program, already carries work requirements. Able-bodied adults between 18 and 54 who don't have dependents must work at least 80 hours a month to be eligible. Those who don't qualify can only receive food assistance for three months in a three-year period. People can be exempt because of homelessness, being in foster care or for other reasons, or states can apply for waivers if there aren't enough jobs in a region. Research is split on whether SNAP's existing work requirements have the intended effects. Bauer, the Brookings fellow, cited a 2021 study of Virginia food stamp recipients that found work requirements caused a large decline in SNAP participation without a corresponding boost in employment. The food stamp benefits 'are not binding disincentives against labor force participation for a population that overwhelmingly has no income,' the researchers wrote. Republicans have said current policies allow states to exempt too many people from work requirements. The GOP bill would alter the rules, raising the cutoff age to 64. It also newly subjects parents with dependent children ages 7 or older to work requirements, though a spouse in a two-parent household can still be exempt. The bill would also restrict place-based waivers to counties with an unemployment rate of over 10 percent: a bar many areas receiving waivers would not meet. A CBO analysis estimates the changes would reduce direct spending for SNAP by $92 billion over 10 years and push 3.2 million people out of the program. Work requirements are the 'right policy at the right time' for those in need and will stop able-bodied adults from being 'idle and disengaged,' Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said in a statement. The path for shifting housing policies is less clear. Most of the nation's 3,600 public housing agencies do not have work requirements. But about 140 are part of a narrow program called Moving to Work that gives local authorities room to test a range of rules that are not usually permitted, including those to boost self-sufficiency. Housing authorities, nonprofit groups, property managers and tenants are eager for details on whether work requirements will be mandatory, how many hours of work would be required and who would be exempt. The HUD official briefed on the matter told The Post that 'everything is on the table' and noted that the White House's proposal for a new two-year cap on rental assistance was another way of preventing long-term dependency. In 2024, nearly half of non-elderly, nondisabled households receiving HUD assistance did not include anyone who worked, said the official, citing internal data. Other research differs. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that based on 2022 data, 60 percent of working-age, nondisabled households receiving HUD rental assistance in 2022 included at least one worker. The HUD official said the administration also supports policies that shift power to local authorities and lets them decide which approaches are best. Within the Moving to Work cohort, the official said around 40 public housing agencies already have work requirements, are implementing them or plan to soon, and that such requirements often improve household incomes and employment. Opponents say an increase in work requirements would fall heavily on people who already have a harder time getting work, keeping steady housing or accessing health care. And they say the loss of benefits would be even more extensive given planned cuts to major services. For example, the White House budget proposal would significantly cut rental assistance programs for the fiscal year beginning in October, in part to shift more power to the states. It is unclear whether those cuts would be achieved through work requirements, since HUD's plans are still in flux. That could amount to millions of people losing aid whether they work or not, since many states won't be able to cover those losses. 'What this indicates is that the driver behind this policy isn't this goal of helping people to advance economically,' said Will Fischer, senior fellow and director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 'The driver is they're trying to cut what they are spending on these programs.' A large share of welfare recipients have jobs. About 32 million people who worked in 2023 got health coverage through Medicaid or food assistance through SNAP, according to a CBPP analysis of census data. In theory, new work requirements shouldn't jeopardize benefits for these recipients. But advocates and left-leaning economists say such requirements do sometimes have that effect - in part because enforcing the rules means enough new administrative burdens that people fall through the cracks. In Georgia, for example, just 12,000 of nearly 250,000 newly eligible recipients received Medicaid after the state implemented work requirements. That was in part because people who worked had a tough time proving it to state officials or their work didn't meet certain qualifications. Finally, those against the policies say even people with jobs sometimes need help making ends meet - so pushing recipients to work wouldn't necessarily solve their household budget problems. Homelessness is worsening among the employed, and inflation often falls hardest on poorer people. At Los Angeles's Downtown Women's Center, which works to end homelessness, regular job training programs are some of the most popular offerings, chief executive Amy Turk said. But even those with jobs need help. A report found that in 2022, nearly 30 percent of homeless women in Los Angeles County were working for pay. Monthly incomes averaged $1,186. In Los Angeles County, though, the average rent is more than $2,000. Analysts at left-leaning think tanks, and some researchers who have studied work requirements, say supporters of the policy have it backward: Health insurance, stable housing and access to food make it possible for people to find work and remain employed. They point to Arkansas, the first state to enact work requirements for Medicaid, as a key example. In 2018, the state implemented its work mandate, which led to 18,000 people losing insurance before a judge in 2019 struck down the requirements in a lawsuit brought by three nonprofits on behalf of some Medicaid recipients. One 40-year-old man lost health coverage after incorrectly reporting the details of his employment and could no longer afford his medication. He suffered complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lost his job and struggled to find work again. Others worked odd jobs that did not always allow them to meet the 80-hour-a-month requirement, like a landscaper who struggled to get work in rainy months. 'You cannot conclude that work makes people healthier,' said MaryBeth Musumeci, an associate professor of health policy and management at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health. 'You need to be physically and mentally healthy enough to work, and particularly for poor people, the types of jobs they are doing can create health problems.' Leaders of Opportunity Arkansas, a conservative policy group, said the state's data shows that most people who lost insurance did so because their incomes rose - exactly the goal of requiring work. 'If Congress is serious about restoring Medicaid as a safety net for the truly needy - not a long-term program for able-bodied adults - then policies that encourage work and self-sufficiency, like the one Arkansas implemented, need to be part of the conversation,' J. Robertson, the organization's public affairs director, said in an email. - - - Jacob Bogage contributed to this report. 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The GOP's New Medicaid Denialism
Congressional Republicans claim to have achieved something truly miraculous. Their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, they argue, would cut nearly $800 billion from Medicaid spending over 10 years without causing any Americans to lose health care—or, at least, without making anyone who loses health care worse off. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, by imposing Medicaid work requirements, the bill would eventually increase the uninsured population by at least 8.6 million. At first, Republican officials tried to defend this outcome on the grounds that it would affect only lazy people who refuse to work. This is clearly untrue, however. As voluminous research literature shows, work requirements achieve savings by implementing burdensome paperwork obligations that mostly take Medicaid from eligible beneficiaries, not 25-year-old guys who prefer playing video games to getting a job. Perhaps for that reason, some Republicans in Washington are now making even more audacious claims. On CNN over the weekend, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought insisted that 'no one will lose coverage as a result of this bill.' Likewise, Joni Ernst, a Republican senator from Iowa, recently told voters at a town hall, 'Everyone says that Medicaid is being cut, people are going to see their benefits cut; that's not true.' After one attendee shouted, 'People will die,' Ernst replied, 'We all are going to die,' and later doubled down on her comment on social media, attempting to equate concern that Medicaid cuts could harm people with believing in the tooth fairy. Officials such as Vought and Ernst have not provided a detailed explanation of their blithe assurances. But there is one center of conservative thought that has attempted to defend these claims: the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Last week, it published an editorial headlined 'The Medicaid Scare Campaign.' The thesis is that the Medicaid cuts would 'improve healthcare by expanding private insurance options, which provide better access and health outcomes than Medicaid.' This would be, as they say, huge if true: The GOP has found a way to give low-income Americans better health care while saving hundreds of billions in taxpayer money. The timing is even more remarkable, given that this wondrous solution has come along at precisely the moment when congressional Republicans are desperate for budget savings to partially offset the costs of a regressive and fiscally irresponsible tax cut. Sadly, a close reading of The Wall Street Journal's editorial reveals that no such miracle is in the offing. Instead, the argument relies on a series of misunderstandings and non sequiturs to obscure the obvious fact that cutting Medicaid would make poor people sicker and more likely to die. [Jonathan Chait: The cynical Republican plan to cut Medicaid] The editorial begins by acknowledging a recent study's conclusion that Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act reduced mortality by 2.5 percent among low-income American adults. This would imply that taking Medicaid away from people would cause many of them to die. Not so fast, the editorial insists: 'The 2.5% difference in mortality for low-income adults between the expansion and non-expansion states wasn't statistically significant when disabled adults were included.' The implication is that the lifesaving effect of the Medicaid expansion disappears if you include disabled adults. In fact, Bruce Meyer, a University of Chicago economist and a co-author of the study, told me that the reason the study excluded disabled adults is that they were already eligible for public health insurance before the expansion. The way to measure the effect of a change is to focus on the population that was treated to the change. So either the Wall Street Journal editorial board is misleading its audience intentionally or it does not understand statistics. (Decades of Journal editorials provide ample grounds for both explanations.) The editorial then suggests that Obamacare has not overcome other social factors that are causing people to die: 'What's clear is that the ObamaCare expansion hasn't reduced deaths among lower-income, able-bodied adults. U.S. life expectancy remains about the same as it was in 2014 owing largely to increased deaths among such adults from drug overdoses and chronic diseases.' This passage, like the previous one, is intended to sound like a claim that giving people access to medical care does not reduce their likelihood of suffering a premature death. But that is not really what it's saying. The editorial is merely noting that the drug epidemic and other factors worked against the effects of the Medicaid expansion. Presumably, if the government had started throwing people off their health insurance at the same time that the drug-overdose epidemic was surging, then life expectancy would have gotten even worse. The article goes on to explain that Medicaid reimburses doctors and hospitals at a lower rate than private insurance does. That is absolutely correct: In the United States, Medicaid is the cheapest existing way to give people access to medical care. The editorial laments that Medicaid recipients have worse outcomes than people on private insurance do. But the Republican plan isn't to put Medicaid recipients on private insurance, which would cost money. The plan is to take away even their extremely cheap insurance and leave them with nothing. (Well, not nothing: The editorial notes that the bill would double 'the health-savings account contribution limit to $17,100 from $8,550 for families earning up to $150,000.' For reference, in most states, a four-person household must earn less than $45,000 a year to be eligible for Medicaid.) Finally, the editorial asserts, 'The GOP bill is unlikely to cause many Americans to lose Medicaid coverage.' Here is where I would analyze the editorial's support for this remarkable claim, but there is none. The sentence just floats by itself in a sea of text that bears no relationship to it. Indeed, the editorial doesn't even attempt to explain why the official Congressional Budget Office estimate is dramatically wrong. Nor does it engage with the mountain of evidence showing that people who obtain Medicaid coverage tend, naturally enough, to be better off as a result. The near-universal belief that being able to see a doctor and buy medicine makes you healthier is the kind of presumption that would take extraordinary evidence to refute. The Wall Street Journal editorial offers none at all. Advocates of the House bill have cultivated an aura of condescension toward anybody who states its plain implications. But even the most detailed attempt to substantiate their position consists entirely of deflections and half-truths. If this is the best case that can be made for worrying about the GOP's plan for Medicaid, then Americans should be worried indeed. Article originally published at The Atlantic
