Republicans Revolt Against Trump’s Obamacare Fix

Trump on Saturday
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By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey

Happy Monday! A federal judge today threw out the high-profile criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the loyalist prosecutor installed by President Donald Trump, was appointed illegally and had no legal authority to bring the indictments. The dismissals deliver an embarrassing setback for the administration and a sharp rebuke of its efforts to pursue retribution against targets picked by Trump. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that Halligan was legally appointed and said that the Justice Department will be appealing "very soon."

Here's what else is happening.

Republicans Revolt Against Trump's Obamacare Fix: Reports

The White House has reportedly delayed plans to roll out a proposal addressing the looming expiration of enhanced Obamacare subsidies after facing a backlash from congressional Republicans.

President Trump was expected to unveil a framework that called for a two-year extension of the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year and were at the heart of the 43-day government shutdown fight. The White House proposal, reportedly titled the "Healthcare Price Cuts Act," also called for additional limits on eligibility for the subsidies, including an income cap set at 700% of the poverty level, and required a minimum monthly premium payment. The plan also included deposits into tax-advantaged savings accounts meant to encourage people to downgrade their coverage and pick lower-premium options on the ACA exchanges.

The White House outline, reported Sunday by MS NOW and Politico, was subject to change, but it signaled Trump's first substantive engagement on the healthcare issue that led to the shutdown - and a notable, albeit temporary, acceptance of the subsidies that have divided Republicans. The Trump plan essentially would have acknowledged the practical and political need to prevent millions of Americans from being hit with massive spikes in premium payments.

But unofficial White House plans to unveil the proposal as early as Monday were reportedly derailed by congressional pushback that forced a delay and a reworking of the Trump framework. "I don't see how a proposal like this has any chance of getting majority Republican support," one unnamed House conservative told MS NOW. "We need to be focused on health care, but extending Obamacare isn't even serious."

Hardline conservatives adamantly oppose any move to prop up an Obamacare program they have long derided and sought to repeal - and, in particular, any extension of the ACA subsidies, which they argue just increase costs and pad the profits of insurance companies. But some GOP moderates have been pushing to extend the subsidies, perhaps with modifications, to avoid near-term pain for their constituents.

Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, one of the moderates who voted to reopen the government, on Sunday welcomed the news that Trump was preparing a plan. "We need to learn more about what exactly the President is putting forward, and we must ensure that any proposal rejects the idea of repealing the Affordable Care Act and its protections, such as coverage for pre-existing conditions," she said in a statement. "While I have significant concerns about some of the ideas reportedly in the President's proposal, it nonetheless represents a starting point for serious negotiations."

The bottom line: That starting point has been delayed, but the White House reportedly still expects to make an announcement soon.

DOGE Reportedly Shut Down Months Ahead of Schedule

The Department of Government Efficiency was created to fulfill the long-time conservative dream of cleaning out a federal government that is supposedly riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, but the project has apparently come to a premature end after running into a more mundane reality.

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month that DOGE, as it was known, has ceased to function, eight months before its scheduled shutdown next summer. "That doesn't exist," Kupor said, adding that DOGE is no longer a "centralized entity" and that many of DOGE's functions have been absorbed by OPM.

Kupor also said that a government-wide hiring freeze, a signature DOGE initiative, is now over.

On Monday, the White House pushed back against the Reuters story, saying that while DOGE is now decentralized, its spirit lives on. "The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under @USDS [U.S. DOGE Service]," Kupor wrote. "But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc."

Still, even as he sang its praises, Kupor referred to DOGE in the past tense. "DOGE catalyzed these changes," he wrote, adding that "the agencies ... will institutionalize them!"

What was it? DOGE, whose name invokes a popular "meme coin" cryptocurrency, was the brainchild of Elon Musk, the world's richest man, who promised to bring technical wizardry and good-old-fashioned common sense to budgeting and staffing in the federal government, with the promise of saving literally trillions of dollars in government spending. Musk vowed he could cut some $2 trillion in waste, though that lofty estimate was halved by the time the project started moving from campaign trail rhetoric to an actual agency within the executive branch.

As the second Trump administration got rolling earlier this year, Musk and his hand-selected group of youthful data engineers - including a 19-year-old named Edward Coristine, who famously went by the nickname "Big Balls" - pressured government workers to quit as part of a plan to root out what they said was wasteful spending. But much of the waste, it turns out, was simply spending they disagreed with for political reasons, including foreign aid and rent for office space. Nevertheless, thousands of employees were fired or furloughed, contracts were canceled and an entire federal agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development, was fed "into the wood chipper," as Musk memorably put it.

The savings, though, proved harder to come by than initially estimated, and Musk left the project in May amid conflict with President Trump. DOGE staffers, many of whom had been living in the offices they were aiming to close, reportedly packed up their sleeping bags in June.

One problem DOGE encountered is that the federal government was nowhere near as swampy as they imagined. One former staffer who was embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs told NPR in June that he was "pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was."

"I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse," the staffer, Sahil Lavingia, said. While there may be some waste, there is very little fraud and virtually no abuse. "I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing," he said.

Lavingia added that the government could take steps to become more efficient, such as cutting down on paper use and faxing. "[B]ut these aren't necessarily fraud, waste and abuse," he said. "These are just rooms to modernize and improve the U.S. federal government into the 21st century."

Producing savings, or more waste? DOGE claimed huge savings on a website that tracked its activities, but analysts raised questions about the accuracy of its claims. "[W]hen Mr. Musk's group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year - and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all," The New York Times's David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine said in April.

Some of DOGE's critics said the project was doomed from the start, given its fanciful assumptions about rampant waste, fraud and abuse. Worse, some suspected that DOGE was created to give Musk and his minions an excuse to run wild in the federal government's information systems - a suspicion backed by whistleblower claims that sensitive Social Security data on hundreds of millions of Americans was downloaded by DOGE operatives, putting the information at risk.

Others called DOGE a success, if you assume its real purpose was to impair the government and terrorize federal employees - an odd idea, perhaps, but one that meshed with a comment by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who famously said he wanted "bureaucrats to be traumatically affected" by a second Trump administration.

In any event, it's clear that DOGE fell far short, at least when it comes to its main claim of saving massive amounts of money. "Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was," Bobby Kogan, a budget analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank who served as an adviser in the Biden administration, wrote on social media. "Spending in FY25 was not only [higher] than in FY24 - but higher than it was projected to be when Trump took office."

Jessica Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, wrote that DOGE failed because it did not understand that waste plays only a minor role in federal budget deficits. Staffing by "arrogant, unqualified hacks" made it worse, while attempting to circumvent Congress on spending matters probably made it illegal.

"It was always just 'spending cut theater,'" Riedl concluded.

Quote of the Day

"More explosive early resignations are coming. It's a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out."

— An unnamed senior Republican in the House, talking to Punchbowl News about Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's surprise announcement that she plans to step down from Congress in January.

"This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL," the lawmaker said. "And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen."

The sour mood is pervasive, the lawmaker said, and most Republicans think their time in the majority is limited. "That is the sentiment of nearly all - appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off-putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened. They don't even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank-and-file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms."

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