Tensions are boiling over inside the typically bipartisan House Energy and Commerce Committee, with Democrats railing against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the GOP’s plan to extend Trump-era tax cuts.
With little power in GOP-led Washington, Democrats are hijacking a markup to adopt the committee’s oversight plan to advance their message — both by speechifying and forcing votes on more than 50 likely-doomed amendments on thorny issues like preventing spending cuts to Medicaid, condemning President Donald Trump’s firing of inspectors general and disapproving of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine leanings.
At times raising their voices and pounding the dias, Democrats are arguing this isn’t business-as-usual amid what they see as unconstitutional and illegal behavior from the Trump administration, and that the Republican oversight plan for committee business in the 119th Congress does little to hold the president and his people to account.
Lawmakers sparred over one amendment for more than an hour aimed at preventing cuts to Medicaid. House Republicans are looking to ram through a budget resolution later in the day that would set parameters for the major party-line package to enact huge swaths of Trump’s domestic agenda.
It may not have the support to advance amid concerns from many lawmakers — including some who sit on Energy and Commerce — about the likelihood of having to make major reductions to Medicaid in order to finance the bill. The safety net program is directly under the committee’s purview, putting Energy and Commerce members at the tip of the spear of a politically dicey exercise.
Republicans have tried to tamp down opposition by saying those offsets would be secured through more work requirements and taking away benefits from illegal immigrants. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), the chair of the health subcommittee, said Medicaid needs to be preserved to protect vulnerable Americans as unchecked spending growth is putting the program at risk, and that fraud, waste and abuse in the system should be addressed.
“We’re only going to do this in a responsible way,” said full committee chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.). “We’re not going to do this in a way that threatens hospitals.”
But Democrats countered the GOP will not be able to reach its savings target without major disruptions to Medicaid benefits across-the-board.
“We have not heard a single concrete number of the amount of waste and abuse that has been identified. There’s kind of this vague magic wand around waste,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “What’s being suggested is that … people people seeing the doctor is a waste.”
The amendment was not adopted, with no Republican voting in favor.
Republicans are largely defending their oversight plan, saying it closely hews to the agenda roadmap the GOP-led Energy and Commerce Committee advanced in the previous Congress. But speaking in favor of one Democratic amendment that would have the panel investigate the Office of Management and Budget’s recent funding cuts at the National Institute of Health, Ocasio-Cortez said such comparisons were disingenuous.
“DOGE did not exist two years ago. Nineteen-year-olds were not raiding the Treasury two years ago,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Elon Musk is not a scientist. He is not an engineer. He is a billionaire conman with a lot of money. … These are peoples’ lives that are on the line and we cannot laugh them away.”
Carter countered the Trump administration is looking to make the health research agency more efficient and pointed to declining trust in health agencies: “This committee has the broadest jurisdiction of any committee in Congress. It would be virtually impossible for us to include everything we’re going to be looking at.”
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), the ranking member of the panel’s health subcommittee, fired back, saying that such plans are generally inclusive of what the party in power wants.
That amendment was voted down along party lines, alongside another amendment that would have added language to the oversight blueprint instructing the committee to “investigate the constitutionality and legality of the Trump administration’s seizure of congressionally appropriated funds.”
