Trump’s Medicaid cuts will fund his failed border wall

Tucked into Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” spending bill—which passed in the House last month, and promises major cuts to Medicaid—is a provision to spend $46.5 billion in taxpayer dollars on building his long-promised wall along the US-Mexico border. The White House says that the funding will provide an additional 701 miles of primary wall and 900 miles of river barriers—but given how the construction of the wall played out in Trump’s first term, those numbers are wildly optimistic.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to build 1000 miles of border wall for $8 to $12 billion—and said Mexico would pay for it. As a first-term president, he asked Congress for $5.7 billion towards the wall; it allocated $1.3 billion in border security funding instead, and Trump ended up invoking emergency powers to transfer funds from elsewhere in government to the project. As reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, costs quickly ballooned: by the end of Trump’s first term, only 47 miles of previously unwalled land received new barriers—at a public cost of about $15 billion. An appeals court ruled in October 2020 that Trump’s use of emergency powers to divert billions in military funds to border wall construction was unlawful. Mexico, of course, did not pay for it.  

This time, the bill that includes the massive wall spending narrowly passed the House in a 215-214 vote that saw two Republicans join all Democrats in voting no, with three others voting present or missing the vote altogether. Trump’s bill has faced criticism from Republicans, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) specifically calling for cuts to its border wall spending. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found on Tuesday that the House bill would increase deficits by $2.8 trillion over the next decade. 

To balance out the wall funding, other Senate Republicans have called for further cuts to Medicaid—despite the House bill already cutting hundreds of billions in Medicaid funding, which one analysis from the Annals of Internal Medicine found would increase the number of uninsured people by 7.6 million, and the number of annual deaths by more than 16 thousand. The cuts have been condemned by the medical community, including in a recent statement by the American Hospital Association. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blasted the Senate GOP’s version of the bill, saying that its “cuts to Medicaid are deeper and more devastating than even the Republican House’s disaster of a bill.” An AP-NORC poll released Monday found that the vast majority of Americans do not want to see Medicaid cut, with only 18 percent of US adults saying the program has too much funding. 

The bill itself is also unpopular among the American people: A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 53 percent of voters opposed it, with just 27 percent in support and 20 percent not offering an opinion. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that 42 percent of Americans were not in favor of the bill, with 23 percent supporting—and that fully 52 percent of Americans are specifically against spending $50 billion to complete the border wall. 

But—as with tariffs and attempts to cut agency funding without congressional approval—the administration is evidently willing to put Americans’ concerns aside when spending their money.