House Republicans are moving to block an estimated 1.4 million illegal aliens from receiving American taxpayer-funded Medicaid as Democrats struggle to message their support for the unpopular position.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee completed its markup of its portion of the budget reconciliation bill Wednesday morning after an all-night session which included a provision blocking anyone unable to verify citizenship, nationality, or satisfactory immigration status from coverage.
The committee projects 1.4 million illegal aliens will be removed from the program due to those requirements.
Yet, every Democrat on the committee opposed the bill, with even Democrats not on the committee blasting the proposal to block illegal aliens from the program.
House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) ignored a question from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the cost savings from striking illegal aliens from the taxpayer dole Wednesday and if fighting it would “open up” Democrats to attacks that they support tax dollars going to illegal aliens.
“This is actually another lie in terms of what Republicans are trying to do,” Jeffries replied, attacking Republicans instead for allegedly eliminating health care for American citizens. “The Congressional Budget Office [CBO] has been clear that, if these Medicaid cuts were to become law, approximately 14 million Americans will lose their health care. And the Republicans aren’t even trying to make the argument that the overwhelming majority of those 14 million Americans aren’t actually citizens.”
Breitbart News reported Tuesday that the CBO, which was created as a non-partisan advisory body to Congress, has shown a remarkable level of unreliability and left-wing bias in recent years.
“The CBO’s extensive history of overestimating benefits for Americans from public health care, underestimating costs of Democrat policies on taxpayers, and stacking the deck against Republican policies reveals a deeply partisan agency influencing lawmakers in order to further left-wing causes,” Breitbart News reported.
“In addition to its history of unreliable projections propping up Democrats, according to FEC records, of the nearly $17,000 donated to candidates and committees from CBO employees since 1986, only $250 went to Republican candidates — a single donation to George W. Bush in 2000,” the report continued.
CBO’s healthcare staff, tasked with analyzing Medicaid, is particularly infiltrated by left-wing bias. A staggering 84 percent of CBO’s healthcare staff have verifiable ties to the Democrat party, the report said:
A remarkable 26 of the group’s 32 staff members are registered Democrats or have funded Democrat candidates or affiliated campaign groups. That group includes the Director, Deputy Director, and all of the unit chiefs.
It might be worse. One staffer’s partisan registration was not affiliated with a party, another voted in the 2016 Republican presidential primary in addition to voting in a Democrat primary, and four staffers’ partisan history was undetermined.
Jeffries and House Democrats’ advocacy for illegal aliens is being undercut by Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Newsom released a new budget proposal Wednesday that suggests closing off free health care to illegal aliens in the Medi-Cal program, the state’s version of Medicaid, due to high costs, Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak reported:
Newsom acknowledged that the state faces huge budget deficits for the second year in a row, despite massive federally-funded surpluses before that — amounting to a $12 billion gap that the state government must fill.
As part of his plan to fill the hole, Newsom’s revised 2025-26 budget is proposing $5 billion in savings by barring new “undocumented” immigrants from joining Medi-Cal.
Newsom has moderated some of the radical left-wing stances that sent him to Sacramento but are seen as politically toxic in a national general election — suggesting House Democrats are fighting a battle they may be destined to lose on ensuring taxpayer-funded Medicaid for illegal aliens.
Complicating Democrats’ messaging is their repeated calls for decades to rid Medicaid of waste, fraud, and abuse – the very initiative they now insist to loathe.
As Breitbart News’s Sean Moran reports, Democrats from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to former President Joe Biden have advocated for doing the same thing Republicans now propose.
But for now, the battle lines in the House are clearly drawn. And Republicans are pleased to move forward with the “big, beautiful bill” that ensures taxpayers don’t foot the healthcare bill for noncitizens in the country illegally.
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.
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