Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) has little patience for the false claims President Donald Trump's budget director is making about the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump's sweeping budget measure that slashes hundreds of billions from Medicaid and food stamps.
In a recent interview on CNN, Russ Vought, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget and the former architect of the Project 2025 agenda, was pressed by anchor Dana Bash, who noted there is "pushback" over the Medicaid cuts. She also mentioned criticism of the bill from Trump's longtime ally, tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has slammed it as making the national deficit worse.
Vought replied, "No one will lose coverage as a result of this bill."
Smith, however, replied to a clip of the interview posted on X by saying, "Math is hard... but Google is free."
She provided a screenshot of a Google result on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis of the bill, finding that "cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would result in roughly 13.7 million people losing their health insurance by 2034."
House Republicans, who narrowly passed OBBBA after intensive wrangling between swing-district Republicans in high-tax areas and far-right hardliners who wanted even more intense cuts, dispute the credibility of the CBO report, with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) proclaiming the office is biased and claiming they got the cost of the 2017 Trump tax bill wrong — even though the deficit in fact went up by more than they predicted, not less.
However, in the Senate, there is greater concern about the bill, with several Republicans demanding a major overhaul and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) outright saying the new work requirements House Republicans want to impose on Medicaid would be "devastating" to her home state.
