At Budget Hearing, Boyle Slams Republican Plans to Gut Health Care and Food Assistance to Pay for Billionaire Tax Breaks
WASHINGTON, DC -- Today, Congressman Brendan F. Boyle (PA-02), Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, delivered remarks at a Budget Committee hearing exposing Republican plans to make the largest cuts to health care and food assistance in American history.
During the hearing, Ranking Member Boyle highlighted nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which confirms that Trump's "Big Bill for Billionaires" would gut Medicaid, strip health care from millions, and take food off the tables of working families -- all to hand massive tax giveaways to the ultra-wealthy.
Boyle also pushed back on false and insulting Republican claims suggesting that the 16 million people who would lose coverage under their plan are all committing fraud, exposing this smear for what it is: an excuse to take away health care from people who need it most.
Remarks as delivered and video are below:
(Click for video of remarks as delivered)
Ranking Member Boyle's opening remarks as delivered:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I do thank the witnesses, and welcome back, Matthew. But thank you all for taking the time to be here today. So obviously there was a lot just said. Let me attempt to address some of it. Here's the state of play.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Republican bill, the Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires will throw 16 million Americans off their health care. That is a fact. It will also deny nutrition assistance to another four and a half million Americans. Why? In furtherance of more than $5 trillion worth of tax cuts, almost all of which go to the top 1 percent of Americans.
In fact, this "tax cut" will end up being an increase for the bottom third of Americans when you look at the bill in its totality. And that's quite different from the Reagan tax cuts of '81 or the George W. Bush tax cuts of 2001 or 2003, or even the original TCJA from eight years ago. The Joint Committee on Taxation found that if this Republican big bill were to become law, every household making under $55,000 a year would be poorer as a result of this legislation.
So, the facts remain under this legislation the poor will get poorer, the rich will get richer, and the middle class will be falling further behind. But that's not all. The bill also dramatically increases both our deficit and our national debt. On a dynamic basis, the bill increases deficits by $3.4 trillion.
So, for all the talk that we're hearing about deficit and debt, this bill takes a bad situation and makes it far worse. Now, as we spent a lot of time together in the middle of the night on the House floor some weeks ago, I noticed that you tended to hear a couple responses from my Republican friends to these facts.
One was to simply just deny the Congressional Budget Office's analysis altogether. Here's the problem. It's not just the official scorekeepers, CBO. It's the Joint Committee on Taxation. It is left-leaning groups. It is right-leaning groups. It is non-partisan groups all finding the same thing. This dramatically increases deficit and debt and will lead to millions of Americans losing their healthcare.
Their second argument is, okay, maybe millions will lose their health care, but "they're all illegals anyway," so it doesn't matter. Not true. Again, the CBO has verified, these are almost all entirely people here legally or US citizens.
And then that brings us to the last point, which apparently is the subject of our hearing today. Well, "it's all really just waste and fraud." Now look, I want to be clear when it comes to rooting out waste and fraud, this absolutely should be bipartisan.
As someone who believes that government can be a force for good in people's lives, I'm offended by the idea of anyone who would rip off the system.
Some of the examples that the chairman just referenced were egregious. Those people, frankly, broke the law and should be prosecuted fully. So, there is no defense on this side of the aisle for any actual instances of waste and fraud and frankly, criminality.
But the real fraud here is to pretend that 16 million Americans who are going to lose their health care are all just defrauding the system. That doesn't pass the smell test.
No rational person recognizes that millions and millions of Americans are going to lose their health care but they're all somehow fraudsters. What an actually insulting perception one must have of the American people. Studies continue to show the hardest working people on earth, the most efficient workforce, the American people.
The fact of the matter is, most folks in my district work damn hard just to get by. I represent a great district, half the city of Philadelphia. People in my neighborhood, in the neighborhoods I represent, work hard, play by the rules, and are just trying to advance and provide more for their kids than they have.
That's actually the face of the American family, hardworking folks. So, this bill is egregious. It will be, and this is a fact, the greatest loss of health care in American history. It will add trillions of dollars to the deficit and debt, making our challenging problem even worse. And in the end, who will benefit? The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
It is wrong. It is bad economics, and I hope that anyone watching this who is as outraged about this bill as I am, will get active and get involved. It was just a one-vote margin in the House of Representatives a couple weeks ago.
It might just be a one-vote margin in the Senate, just like it was eight years ago when saving the Affordable Care Act came down to one vote and it ended up being a thumbs down. Because of that thumbs down, more than 20 million Americans have their health care today, who otherwise wouldn't have it. I hope history, this summer, can repeat itself. With that, I yield back.
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