Trouble’s brewing among Republicans on the Hill over finding the spending cuts necessary to move forward with President Trump’s budget measure dubbed “one, big beautiful bill.” House and Senate leaders are looking at the swollen expenses in the Medicaid program, which helps insure the poorest, as a place where greater efficiencies — and work requirements — could yield cost savings to the tune of hundreds of billions of spondulix over a decade.

Not so fast, say the GOP’s big spenders. These Republican solons are getting cold feet at the possibility of paring back federal outlays on Medicaid. The health program cost taxpayers some $616 billion in 2023. By 2035, if reforms aren’t enacted, Medicaid is expected to cost $1 trillion a year. Surely, amid the $8.6 trillion Uncle Sam is expected to spend on Medicaid over the next decade, there’s room to find some 10 percent in savings, as GOP budgeters anticipate. 

Senator Moran of Kansas won’t hear of it. He fears slowing the rate of spending growth on Medicaid could “threaten rural hospitals,” the Times reports. “I want to make certain that my colleagues know, in my view, the value of making certain we do no harm to those in desperate need of health care in Kansas and across the country,” he frets. “I’m not going to vote for Medicaid benefit cuts,” avers Senator Hawley, part of the GOP’s neo-populist wing.

Senator Collins says the prospect of less spending on Medicaid “troubles me greatly,” though she did express openness to some work requirements for the benefit. Senator Murkowski, too, is balking at “significant cuts to Medicaid.” Senator Justice calls the program “monstrously important.” Considering the GOP’s slender majority in the Senate, the reservations of these holdouts could prove fatal to passage of Mr. Trump’s budget.  

The trouble isn’t confined to the upper chamber. In the House, too, some Republicans are grousing about spending reductions. As far as the level of anticipated budget savings goes, “I don’t really believe that the number will be $1.5 trillion,” Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis tells CNN. “I think that it probably will come in a little lower,” she reckons. An unnamed lawmaker calls it a “pipe dream” to think the Senate will back that spending reduction.

Credit the fiscal stalwarts in the House, at least, for holding the line on federal overspending. They appear to grasp the danger posed to America by runaway spending and the accompanying surge in the national debt. That debt danger, these columns cautioned last week, was underscored when President Trump retreated from his reciprocal tariff plans in part — if only in part — because of the unrest in the debt market putting pressure on Treasury bonds.

That amounted to a warning from America’s creditors that Uncle Sam couldn’t necessarily afford to pursue Mr. Trump’s policy push toward reshoring manufacturing and lowering tariff barriers imposed by foreign nations. That’s a wake up call, if there ever were  one, over the need to put America’s fiscal house in order. Yet there’s no way to get the federal budget in balance, and the debt falling, without reductions in the proposed level of federal spending. 

These columns are not alone in urging fiscal restraint on the Hill. Yet one caveat in the Sun’s position in the budget debate is that the crisis of surging federal debt can’t be viewed in isolation. That is, without addressing the underlying monetary crisis — of which the plummeting value of the dollar in gold is the prime indicator — posed by America’s default to fiat money since the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system in 1971.

Cost savings, too, are critical. Critics of work requirements for Medicaid can weigh Senator Moynihan’s jeremiad in 1996 that a similar reform to welfare for single mothers would lead to “children sleeping on grates.” Yet the policy proved a success. Many single mothers joined, or rejoined, the work force and welfare rolls fell by more than half. It’s not hard to envision similar results, and savings, for Medicaid, if the GOP keeps its big spenders in line.