House GOP floats plan to slash benefits for the poor to pay for Trump tax cuts

One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was a promise of sweeping tax cuts, for the rich, for working people and for companies alike.

Now congressional Republicans have the job of figuring out which of those cuts to propose into law. In order to pay for the cuts, they have started to eye some targets to raise money. Among them: cutting benefits for single mothers and poor people who rely on government health care.

The proposals are included in a menu of tax and spending cut options circulated this month by House Republicans. Whether or not Republicans enact any of the ideas remains to be seen. Some of the potential targets are popular tax breaks and cuts could be politically treacherous. And cutting taxes for the wealthy could risk damaging the populist image that Trump has cultivated.

For the ultrawealthy, the document floats eliminating the federal estate tax, at an estimated cost of $370 billion in revenue for the government over a decade. The tax, which charges a percentage of the value of a person’s fortune after they die, kicks in only for estates worth more than around $14 million.

Among those very few Americans who do get hit with the tax, nearly 30% of the tax is paid by the top 0.1% by income, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center think tank. (Many ultra-wealthy people already largely avoid the tax. Over the years, lawyers and accountants have devised ways to pass fortunes to heirs tax free, often by using complex trust structures, as ProPublica has previously reported.)

Another proposal aims to slash the top tax rate paid by corporations by almost a third.

Trump promised such a cut during the campaign. But Vice President JD Vance came out against it before Trump picked him as his running mate. “We’re sort of in line with the OECD right now,” he said in an interview last year, referring to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 38 wealthy developed nations. “I don’t think we need to be cutting the corporate tax rate further.”

In Trump’s first term, he brought the top corporate rate down from 35% to 21%, where it’s at now, taking the U.S. from a high rate compared to other OECD nations to about average. The proposed cut to 15% would make the United States’ rate among the lowest of such countries.

To pay for new tax cuts, the House Republicans’ proposal floats a series of potential overhauls of government programs. One major focus is possible cuts to Medicaid, the health care program for people with low incomes that is administered by the states. Medicaid expansion was a key tenet of the Affordable Care Act, passed under President Barack Obama. Many Republican governors initially chose not to take advantage of the new federal subsidies to expand the program. In the intervening years, several states reversed course, and the program has expanded the number of people enrolled in Medicaid by more than 20 million, as of last year.

The deep cuts to the program floated in the document include slashing reimbursements to the states. States would need to “raise new revenues or reduce Medicaid spending by eliminating coverage for some people, covering fewer services, and (or) cutting rates paid to physicians, hospitals, and nursing homes,” according to an analysis by KFF, a health policy organization.

Trump has been inconsistent in his position on Medicaid over the years. He sought to slash the program in his first term. But he has also made statements about protecting it over the years.

As recently as a 2023 campaign event, Trump promised that “we’re not going to play around with Medicare, Medicaid.” But it’s not clear whether the comment was a throwaway: While preserving Medicare, the program that covers health care for the elderly, has been a focus for Trump, maintaining Medicaid has not. The official GOP platform rolled out by Trump last year, for example, promised not to cut “one penny” from Medicare but was silent on Medicaid. In separate remarks during the campaign last year, Trump appeared to endorse cuts to "entitlements," after an interviewer asked about Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Other proposals would eliminate tax breaks for families with children.

Currently, parents can get a tax credit of up to $2,100 for child care expenses. The House Republican plan floats the elimination of that break. The cut is estimated to save $55 billion over a decade.

Vance, in particular, had promised economic policies that would lessen the load on parents. “It is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids,” he said last week. (He campaigned on a proposal to more than double the child tax credit.)

Another proposal in the list of options takes aim squarely at parents raising children on their own. The provision would eliminate the “head of household” filing status to collect almost $200 billion more in taxes over a decade from single parents and other adults caring for dependents on their own.

The “head of household” status was created in the 1950s under the rationale that single parents should have a lighter tax burden. Eliminating it would affect millions of Americans, largely women. (The after-tax pay of people with incomes between the 20th and 80th percentiles, those making between about $14,000 and $100,000, would fall by the highest percentage, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation.)

Democrats have criticized the proposals as a gift to the wealthy at the expense of the working class. “Republicans are gearing up for a class war against everyday families in America,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to questions about the specifics in the House GOP document but said in an email that “This is an active negotiation and process one that the President and his team are working productively with congress. His visit to the House Retreat [Monday] was a sign that he wants to prioritize unity and a good deal for American that achieves his campaign promises.”

A spokesperson for the House Budget Committee declined to answer specific questions but said “this is a menu of policy options for authorizing committees to consider as members navigate the reconciliation process.”

Some of the proposals would fulfill Trump’s campaign promises geared toward the working class.

The document includes a plan to eliminate income taxes (but maintain payroll taxes) on tips, at a cost of $106 billion over a decade. The proposal is one Trump touted while campaigning in Las Vegas to win support from the city’s huge contingent of service workers. Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, later pledged to do the same. Economists have criticized the idea as one that unfairly benefits one group of working-class employees over others who get paid the same but work in other industries that don’t deal in tips.

Another Trump campaign promise included in the document is ending taxes on overtime pay, at a price of $750 billion over a decade. That proposal has also been criticized by tax experts as an inefficient way to provide relief for lower-paid workers who are eligible for overtime because they’re paid hourly and perform repetitive tasks. The provision, critics say, would invite gaming and further complicate tax reporting by creating new reporting requirements about the hours a taxpayer worked.

One of the biggest-ticket proposals to raise new revenue in the House Republicans’ document would hit a tax break cherished by upper-income Americans: eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. The document estimates $1 trillion in savings over 10 years by eliminating the break. Because of a complex interplay of different features of the tax code, an estimated 60% of the value of this deduction flows to Americans making over $200,000 per year, according to the Tax Foundation.

Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction would have an uneven geographic impact: analyseshave found the tax break is more valuable to Americans in Democratic-dominated states such as California, Massachusetts and New Jersey.