House Speaker Mike Johnson was grilled on CBS News Sunday about the “One Big Beautiful Bill” he helped get through Congress.
CBS News’ Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pressed Johnson on President Trump‘s bill, asking him how he was going to justify to his constituents that nearly 200,000 people from his home-state of Louisiana could lose their Medicaid coverage as a result.
The bill states, among other things, that it will eliminate taxes on tips, extend Trump’s 2017 corporate and individual tax cuts, spend over $50 billion to build a wall and hire border patrol agents, and, most importantly, cut $1 trillion in funding to Medicaid and food stamps.
But Johnson replied that the bill would not cut Medicaid or SNAP, the food stamp program, and instead work to prevent people from “defrauding” the system, which he claimed was being abused by “illegal aliens.”
“Just in Medicaid, for example, you’ve got 1.4 million illegal aliens receiving those benefits. That is not what medicaid is intended for,” Johnson said. “It’s intended for vulnerable populations… and people who desperately need those resources. Right now they’re being drained by fraud, waste, and abuse.”
Brennan fired back, reminding Johnson that “first of all, undocumented immigrants, you know, are not eligible for food stamps or medicaid,” though “some lawfully present immigrants are.”
“And yet they’re receiving them, that’s the problem,” Johnson retorted.
Medicaid has been a highly contested issue on the bill by both sides of the House. Trump allegedly told members of the Republican conference Tuesday: “Don’t f— around with Medicaid.”
The revised version of the bill that passed through Congress by a 215-214 vote Thursday morning stated that in order to save money on Medicaid, there would now be a work requirement tagged onto it.
Johnson claimed that there are “about 4.8 million people on Medicaid right now nationwide who are able-bodied workers,” but are not working and simply “taking advantage of the system.”
“If you are able to work and you refuse to do so, you are defrauding the system, you’re cheating the system, and no one in the country believes that that’s right,” he said.
He also added that there is “a moral component to what we’re doing,” justifying the bill by saying that, “when you make young men work, it’s good for them, it’s good for their dignity, it’s good for their self worth, and it’s good for the community that they live in.”
But Brennan continued to grill Johnson, questioning him on the non-profit KFF’s findings that 190,000 people in Louisiana could lose medicaid under the bill’s new requirements, asking if his position was that “they were just lazy, not working? That they were undocumented?”
“This is not some onerous thing, this is common sense,” Johnson replied, failing to address the findings. “And when the American people understand what we are doing here, they applaud it.”
“What we’re doing is strengthening Medicaid and SNAP so that they can exist, so that they’ll be there for the ppl that desperately need it the most, and it’s not being taken advantage of,” he said. “And this is something that everybody in Congress, Republicans and Democrats, should agree to.”
Brennan pointed out that GOP Sen. Josh Hawley denounced the bill, calling it “morally wrong and politically suicidal to slash health insurance for the working poor.”
She also reminded Johnson that “Louisiana is, like, the second largest recipient of food stamps in the country sir.”
But Johnson retorted that he doesn’t want to slash benefits and that the bill will not cut Medicaid or SNAP.
“This is common sense Margaret, it’s good government, and everybody on both sides of the aisle should agree to that,” he stated.
Now the bill will be passed to the Senate, where it could undergo additional revisions. But Johnson assured Brennan that he encouraged his Republican colleagues to remember that “we are one team,” and to “make as few modifications as possible” to the bill as it moves through.
“This is a big thing, it’s a historic thing. Once in a generation legislation. We call it the ‘one, big beautiful bill’ because it’s going to do so much and the America-first agenda will be delivered to the people just as we promised,” Johnson said.
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