April 5, 2025
By Marc Stier
At 2:30 this morning, Pennsylvania Republican senator Dave McCormick joined all but two Republicans to pass a budget resolution that made their priorities for this country absolutely clear: They aim to take health insurance and food assistance away from hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians and millions of Americans in order to pay for deep cuts in taxes for the wealthy, even as Trump’s tariffs radically increase taxes on working people in our state and devastate Pennsylvania farmers.
McCormick and Senate Republicans rejected Democrat-proposed amendments that would have protected Medicaid from any budget cuts; that would have blocked the new tariffs; and that would have rolled back the Trump administration’s illegal and unconstitutional decimation of federal programs that have already been approved and funded by Congress and signed into law by the President.
The Senate’s action thus continues the Trump–Republican three-track assault on the working people of our country.
The Senate budget resolution calls for $5.3 trillion in tax cuts over ten years. The Senate tried to hide the extent of those cuts with budget legerdemain, pretending that an extension of tax cuts that expire at the end of 2025 is not an additional tax cut. That’s the budgetary equivalent of saying that since we spent $2,000 on oil to heat our home this winter, spending the same amount heating our home next winter will cost nothing.
The budget resolution continues a process that will lead to deep reductions in spending on Medicaid, SNAP, and ACA subsidies for health insurance. Specific recommendations for cutting these programs will be decided by legislative committees in the next few months and, ultimately, will be enacted by a budget reconciliation bill that passes the House and Senate. We estimate that there is no way for the goals in the budget resolution to be met without a roughly $4 billion cut to Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program that could deny or reduce benefits to roughly a million people in the state. SNAP benefits in Pennsylvania will suffer cuts of around $1 billion a year, leading to reduced benefits for two million Pennsylvanians.