Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo lost her cool with Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) after he refused to say he would cut Medicaid and other social safety net programs.
During an interview on Thursday, Gill suggested Congress could pay for over $4 trillion in tax cuts being pushed by President Donald Trump by deploying billionaire Elon Musk to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
Gill predicted history books would teach about how Trump "solved" the debt crisis.
"President Trump stood in the gap, brought in one of the smartest people in the world to solve this crisis, and courageously, with yielding attacks from the left, incessantly solved this crisis," he opined. "We are just beginning. But the kinds of things that he is uncovering, that we are uncovering, and the DOGE Subcommittee is absolutely egregious."
"President Trump's only been in office, remember, for 40 days, so Elon Musk has only just begun this process."
As the interview continued, Bartiromo grew frustrated.
"Congressman, I mean, with all due respect, you haven't given me one offset, OK?" she snapped. You say that you're not going to have a problem finding an offset, and so far, all I've heard you talk about is Elon Musk's fraud, waste, and abuse cuts, as well as eliminating climate change rules."
"Again, 76 percent of the money is going to mandatory spending," the host continued. "Isn't it time to start looking at the mandatory spending and trying to figure out how you're actually going to cut?"
"I mean, I know nobody wants to say this, but you've got to cut stuff like Medicaid, don't you?"
For his part, Gill insisted that cutting the Green New Deal programs and allowing for economic growth would offset the tax cuts.
"I agree with you," he remarked. "We are going to have to find some rationalizations. And Medicaid, for instance, job requirements for welfare."
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"So there is a slew of offsets that we have in this reconciliation package that we're going to be looking through," Gill added. "We've only just given the instructions to the various committees, but I just gave you about a billion, excuse me, about a trillion dollars worth of offsets right off the top of my head here."
"Well, a trillion dollars in offsets, but you've got $4.5 trillion that you need to pay for in tax cuts," Bartiromo shot back. "Unfortunately, the Atlanta GDP is expecting a contraction in the first quarter, not growth."
