The administration has been consistent on one point about its 2025 budget law: it does not cut Medicaid. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put it plainly to the Senate Finance Committee in April: 'First of all, there are no cuts in Medicaid' [1]. A year after the law passed, that claim is colliding with what the law is doing.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the law reduces federal Medicaid spending by more than 900 billion dollars over a decade; KFF puts the figure at 911 billion. The budget office projects that about 7.5 million more people will be uninsured by 2034 as a result of the law's Medicaid and related changes [1]. Those are not small adjustments. They amount to the largest reduction in federal Medicaid support in the program's history.
Kennedy's defense is that Medicaid spending still goes up - rising from about 668 billion dollars in 2025 to 981 billion in 2036, a 47 percent increase [1]. That is true and beside the point. Spending rises because the population ages and grows and medical costs climb; a program can spend more in raw dollars while covering fewer people and paying providers less than it otherwise would. The cut is the gap between what the program was projected to spend and what it will spend now - and the budget office puts that gap north of 900 billion dollars. Measuring against last year instead of against the baseline is how a cut gets described as no cut.
The strongest evidence that the cuts are real is that they have started. Coverage began disappearing on the law's July anniversary: roughly 500,000 moderate-income New Yorkers lost Medicaid coverage on July 1, 2026 [2]. Those are people who had insurance in June and do not in July, by operation of the law an official says cuts nothing.
There is an honest version of the administration's case - that the changes are worth it, that the program needed reining in, that spending still grows. Any of those can be argued. What cannot be argued, as 7.5 million people head toward the ranks of the uninsured and the first half-million have already lost coverage, is that a law cutting federal Medicaid by more than 900 billion dollars makes no cuts at all.
