Republican lawmakers are considering slashing federal health spending to bankroll President Trump’s war in Iran.
“Operation Epic Fury” has stretched into its fifth week, with thousands of fresh U.S. troops sent to the region, ready for deployment.
Now, to help prop up a budget bill containing as much as $200 billion, top House Republicans are eyeing changes to healthcare programs.
“There’s other items we’re looking at right now, especially in the areas of fraud and waste and abuse that we’re working through with our members,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told Axios.
Among the options on the table is cutting the amount of health insurance subsidies that some lower-income Americans get towards their coverage. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington of Texas is pushing a plan that would claw back more than $30 billion by shrinking the assistance people receive to pay their monthly premiums.
The Congressional Budget Office has previously estimated the move would leave 300,000 more Americans without health insurance. Average premiums would fall around 11 percent on paper, but with less help to pay them, the savings would be invisible to the people who need them most.
The move would also help fund ICE, whose budget is a central sticking point in the ongoing partial government shutdown.
Arrington said he wants a law passed in “60 to 90 days.”
“Obviously, we need to put the vote coalition together,” Scalise said, referring to the fact that many moderate Republicans will balk at the plans.
Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska deferred judgment owing to a lack of clarity over the plans. “I mean, I really don’t know what they’re gonna do,” he said. “I think [Speaker] Mike Johnson will be smart.”
Democrats, naturally, have attacked the proposal.
“Republicans in Congress want to cut Americans’ health care to pay for more war in Iran,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote on X. “Let that sink in.”
On Sunday, meanwhile, Scalise refused to rule out boots on the ground in Iran. “We’re having a lot of conversations about what could happen next,” he told ABC News.
Thousands of U.S. ground troops are already quietly massing across the Middle East, The New York Times reported. Several hundred Special Operations forces—including Army Rangers and Navy SEALs—have joined thousands of Marines and Army paratroopers already in the region. The missions being drawn up include forcing the Strait of Hormuz back open, seizing Iran’s oil depots on Kharg Island, and hunting down and removing the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
Trump has publicly flirted with taking Kharg Island but conceded that any operation of that kind “would also mean we had to be there for a while.”
Americans have, from the outset of the conflict last month, opposed any protracted involvement. The war has polled spectacularly poorly. About 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict, while only 37 percent approve, according to the Pew Research Center.
The White House has been contacted for comment on the proposed cuts.
