Golden votes against GOP’s reckless budget bill
Spending package would increase costs for Mainers and make the largest health care cut in history to fund tax breaks for the rich
WASHINGTON — Congressman Jared Golden (ME-02) this morning voted against the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill, which would take health care away from millions of Americans, further rig the tax code in favor of the wealthiest households and corporations and add $3.1 trillion to the national debt by 2034.
The bill passed along party lines in a 215-214 vote.
“The House GOP had every opportunity to work across the aisle to write a budget that put middle-class families first. Instead, they’re ramming through an extreme agenda that takes health care away from the working poor and borrows trillions of dollars to fund a package of tax cuts tilted in favor of those at the top,” Golden said. “Mainers want more health care, not less. They want a tax code where everyone pays their fair share. And they want Congress to get its fiscal house in order. This bill fails on each of those fronts, so this is one of the easiest ‘no’ votes I’ve ever taken.”
The budget bill — crafted under reconciliation rules that will allow it to pass with a simple majority in the Senate — would cut $800 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Medicaid provides health coverage to 236,000 people in CD2 — more than one-third of the population — according to KFF, while roughly 50,000 Mainers qualify for health insurance tax credits on the state’s ACA marketplace, coverME.gov. The bill’s elimination of enhanced ACA tax credits will increase health care costs by an average of $180 per month for tens of thousands of Mainers.
The bill’s cuts to food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program — which helps 1 in 8 Mainers get the food they need — will put more than 18 million kids nationally at risk of losing school meals.
The bill uses those savings to partially cover the cost of roughly $5 trillion in tax cuts, with most of the benefit going to the wealthiest households through provisions such as tax breaks for millionaire heirs and deductions for high-income households in high-income states. “In 2027 it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an annual tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts — the same households who will then bear the brunt of cuts to Medicaid and SNAP,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
In a last-minute amendment to the bill, House GOP Leadership added language that bans insurance plans sold on the ACA marketplace from covering abortion care — an attack on women’s reproductive freedom made under cover of darkness.
Finally, the bill continues Congress’s bad habit of using deficit spending to finance federal expenditures, running up a national debt that threatens the future of critical programs such as Medicare and Social Security. The reconciliation bill would add $3.1 trillion to the national debt, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. This comes at a time when interest on the debt costs the federal government more every year than on national defense or Medicare and second only to Social Security as an annual line item in the federal budget
The bill now heads to the Senate for consideration.
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