Pa. Rep. Lloyd Smucker leads budget hardliners in letter to GOP leaderships renewing call for spending cuts

• By Jaxon White/LNP | LancasterOnline

Lancaster County Congressman Lloyd Smucker led 31 other House Republicans on Wednesday to reiterate their demand that this year’s budget slash federal spending by at least $2 trillion over the next decade.

In a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, first reported by Politico, Smucker and the group of fiscal hawks threatened to pull their support for President Donald Trump’s so-called “one big, beautiful” budget bill if it expands the U.S. spending deficit.

The signers, led by Smucker and including members of the House Freedom Caucus and the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, said their backing depends on “the bill’s strict adherence” to Republicans’ budget outline, which conditions tax cuts on significant reductions in federal spending.

Tax cuts, capped at $4.5 trillion over ten years, would be reduced on a dollar-by-dollar basis if Congress fails to meet the budget plan’s $2 trillion spending cut requirement — a provision authored by Smucker, vice-chair of the Budget Committee and member of the Ways and Means Committee.

“The House reconciliation instructions are binding,” Smucker and his co-signers wrote. “They set a floor for savings, not a ceiling. We must hold that line on fiscal discipline to put the country back on a sustainable path.”

Johnson can stand to lose just four votes on the budget, due to Republicans’ slim 220-213 majority over Democrats in the House. Two seats are vacant due to the death of two Democratic members in March.

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Cutting Medicaid expansion

In a Wednesday afternoon interview with LNP | LancasterOnline, Smucker said individual House committees must be responsible for finding the cost reductions assigned to them in the budget blueprint. That includes the order to the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, to slash $880 billion.

Last week, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and 19 other House Republicans — many of whom joined Smucker’s Wednesday letter, including Roy and Pennsylvania Republican Scott Perry — urged GOP leaders to claw back an Obama-era policy that expanded Medicaid coverage to include low-income working adults who earn up to 138% of the federal poverty rate ($15,650 for a single earner in 2025).

The federal government pays for most of that expansion program, with states that opted in, including Pennsylvania, covering a small percentage.

Smucker did not co-sign Roy’s Medicaid letter, but he took to X on Wednesday to agree with Roy that House Republican leaders are not being sufficiently aggressive on spending cuts.

Asked whether those cuts should come from Medicaid expansion, Smucker said, “I think the states should potentially have more skin in the game.”

That could mean having states pick up more of the costs of Medicaid. Smucker noted a Congressional Research Service finding that 90% of the cost of the Medicaid expansion in Pennsylvania is covered by the federal government, compared to the 56% of costs for beneficiaries who were qualified before the expansion, like low-income children, pregnant women, seniors and people with disabilities.

“If you can work, you should have to work to get those benefits,” Smucker said.

Speaking against the Medicaid cuts in a CNBC interview Wednesday, Philadelphia Democrat Brendan Boyle, ranking member of the Budget Committee who also sits on the Ways and Means Committee, said the GOP plan would cause the largest cut to Medicaid in history.

Boyle joined a long-shot procedural effort — requiring at least five Republicans to join every Democrat in signing a discharge petition — to force a vote on a bill that would preserve federal funding to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the budget resolution.

“Tens of millions of Americans count on Medicaid and SNAP to feed their families and get the health care they need. Protecting them should be a bipartisan issue,” Boyle posted on X. “If House Republicans truly believe in protecting these essential programs, this is their chance to prove it.”

California-based health research group KFF also found that in fiscal year 2023, Pennsylvania paid for roughly 36.5% of total Medicaid recipient costs while the federal government paid for the remaining 63.5%.

KFF estimated the government would save some $626 billion over 10 years by cutting the expansion program nationwide. Assuming states wouldn’t increase their spending on the program to account for the lost dollars, KFF found roughly 20 million Americans could stand to lose health care coverage.