‘If you want Medicaid, get a f***ing job!’ Republicans take hard line in support of Trump bill despite constituent worries
Nancy Mace grabbed her team, hopped in a van and raced back to Washington in her pajamas Wednesday to vote on President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” — driving through stormy weather after scores of flights into D.C. were canceled.
Mace, who is currently weighing a run for governor of South Carolina, knows that she needs the president’s endorsement to win in a state that overwhelmingly supported him in 2024. So the mad dash, and the show she put on social media about it all, makes sense politically.
But while the audience of one in the White House will appreciate the effort, many constituents back home may be far less pleased.
That’s because the Trump megabill forces states to carry part of the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, if they have high rates of overpaying or underpaying recipients.
And Mace sounds ready to throw some pain in the direction of her home state in the name of fighting “waste, fraud and abuse.”
“So under some of the provisions, our state may have to pay fines of upwards of $300 million if we don’t get the fraudulent payments for SNAP under control,” she told The Independent.
The same goes for Medicaid.
“But if you’re talking about able-bodied workers,” she continued, “my policy is, if you’re an able-bodied person and you want Medicaid? Get a f***ing job.”
The Trump bill also puts rural hospitals at risk due to changes in how states can raise money for Medicaid.
In Fiscal Year 2024, South Carolina had a 9.25 percent error rate for SNAP, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, 64.7 percent of families in South Carolina on Medicaid have a full-time worker in their family.
“We’re gonna be fined $300 million a year if our government doesn’t get its s*** together,” Mace said. “If I run for governor, you can be damn sure that’s No. 1 on my list.”
New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who represents a district that Democratic former Vice President Kamala Harris won in last year’s presidential election, echoed the sentiment. Like Mace, he is considering a run for governor and has long complained about the cap that the 2017 Trump tax cuts put on the State and Local Tax Deduction, commonly known as SALT
But Lawler said that the goal of the Trump legislation is to get states to run their programs properly.
“That’s the objective, to get the program fixed so they should be working towards it,” he told The Independent. New York has a 14.09 percent error rate for SNAP.
Republicans have long called for work requirements for social safety net programs, with some policy successes. But the current bill’s work and cost-sharing provisions became a sticking point during the Senate debate.
In the Senate, Republicans cut a deal with Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, whose state has an inordinately high error rate partially because of its rural population, to exempt it state from the cost-sharing part of the bill, which Democrats excoriated.
But Rep. Buddy Carter, who is running for the Republican nomination to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia, defended the change in policy.
“We improved the program,” he told The Independent. ‘We made sure that people who are on there should be on there, they’re going to be off of that. Now we’re going to make it better for those who truly need it.”
Carter is running to represent a state with a large error rate of 15.65 percent.
But Democrats say this will hurt states’ ability to provide SNAP benefits. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee for governor in New Jersey, specifically said it was unfair, “especially from a state that sends $70 billion more to the federal government than we get back.
“If they’re not going to run their programs, why are we paying taxes?” Sherrill told The Independent.
