United States House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Representative:
The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, representing millions of older adults, writes in strong opposition to H.R. 1, the Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 Budget Reconciliation bill because it would result in massive cuts to programs critical to older Americans and their families.
The Budget Reconciliation bill you are considering is the worst of all worlds for seniors: unprecedented cuts to fundamental programs that provide health care and essential services to lower- and moderate-income Americans of all ages, all to partially offset the cost of massive tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy and large, profitable corporations. H.R. 1 represents an unprecedented transfer of wealth from hard-working, everyday Americans to the uber-wealthy. In addition, while this bill is utilizing a reconciliation process that was designed to make it easier for Congress to reduce budget deficits, it will have the opposite effect of raising deficits by trillions of dollars.
In many respects, the Senate-passed version of H.R. 1 will have a harsher impact on seniors and other vulnerable Americans than the version approved by the House. It includes deeper cuts to Medicaid – totaling over $1 trillion, four times the size of previous Medicaid cuts – over $180 billion in cuts to the SNAP food nutrition program, the largest cut to SNAP in the program’s history – and its use of budget gimmicks such as the “current policy baseline” to hide the true cost of the tax cuts obscures the bill’s full potential impact on seniors. While the cost of the tax cuts may be hidden from public view, they are real – and will have a negative impact on our nation’s economy.
The Senate-passed bill includes a $5 trillion increase in the federal debt limit and will add at least $3.3 trillion to the federal debt in the next decade, largely the result of the massive tax cuts included in the bill. It is not unreasonable for America’s seniors to worry that the ultimate effect of starving the nation of this revenue would be to provide a justification for later legislation that would cut the earned benefits Americans have paid for throughout their working lives: Social Security and Medicare. Some uber-wealthy individuals, including Elon Musk, have falsely called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” Cutting and privatizing this critical program, along with Medicare, has long been a goal of many fiscal conservatives, meaning that if an artificial economic crisis caused by massive tax cuts becomes a reality, it will allow them to wrongly assert that the nation can no longer afford these critical programs.
In fact, while H.R. 1 does not directly cut Medicare, adding trillions of dollars in debt will result in automatic reductions in Medicare spending. That is because enactment of this bill will trigger Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) requirements in federal law which will result in a 4 percent sequestration of Medicare spending starting in 2026 if Congress does not act to block the cuts.
As for the tax cuts themselves, proponents of H.R. 1 have claimed that if the full range of Trump tax cuts are not made permanent, lower- and middle-income taxpayers will suffer increases in their tax liability. This is simply not true: Congress could choose to allow the tax cuts for high-income taxpayers and large corporations to expire, while making the remainder permanent. In fact, President Trump himself has suggested raising tax rates for the highest-income Americans – a provision not currently include in this bill.
The spending cuts enshrined in this bill are unprecedented and would result in millions of Americans losing important health care coverage and nutrition services. Some of these losses will be direct, as benefits are lost through changes in eligibility requirements and subsidy levels.
Other benefit losses will happen indirectly as, for example, deep cuts to health care providers will starve many rural hospitals and health facilities of resources, forcing them to close – thus endangering the health not only of those targeted in the bill, but of everyone living in the surrounding communities. The Senate’s effort to compensate for the steep cuts to providers with an ill-defined and totally inadequate “relief fund” may provide a fig-leaf for Senators representing the most at-risk communities to vote for the bill, but it won’t keep your communities healthy. Similarly, the cuts to Medicaid will force nursing homes to shutter their doors, states will have little choice but to cut the home and community-based services that make it possible for seniors and the disabled to age outside of institutional settings, and cuts to the SNAP program will place many seniors at risk of losing critical nutrition services.
The bottom line on this budget bill is this: millions of older adults will be harmed in order to help finance more tax cuts for the wealthiest among us and huge corporations, and the resulting increase in the nation’s debt will hurt everyone through higher inflation and a slowing economy. The magnitude of the debt will also provide more ammunition to those who falsely claim our country can no longer afford to meet its obligations to hard working Americans who are counting on their earned benefits through Social Security and Medicare to help support them in retirement and if they become disabled or a survivor.
H.R. 1 is bad for America, and especially bad for older adults and their families. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare urges every Representative to VOTE NO on the Senate-passed version of this bill for the sake of your constituents.
Sincerely,
Max Richtman
President and CEO