Railing against the provisions in the “One big beautiful bill” that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will increase deficits by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) warns that even though Medicare isn’t directly targeted for cuts in the bill, those cuts are inevitable due a triggering of legally mandated “sequestration.”
[NOTE: The White House refutes the CBO estimates, relying on what it predicts will be “robust, real economic growth” to offset $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and to cut, it says, the deficit in half by 2034.]
“When you pass a bill,” Whitehouse says below, “that adds as much to the debt as this bill does, it kicks in another law — another law called sequestration. And that creates mandatory cuts across the board to a whole variety of federal programs — essentially all of them, but Social Security — and Medicare is subject to those cuts.”
Republicans who claimed, after passing the bill, that “we didn’t do anything to Medicare” aren’t telling the truth, Whitehouse says. “There is no protection from that sequestration cut in their bill,” the Senator says. “They could have put it in but they chose not to.”
Whitehouse frames the inevitable Medicare cuts as a deliberate deception, saying that Republicans have “all promised ‘that they ‘oh no, we wouldn’t possibly cut Medicare.’ What they didn’t tell you is ‘oh no we won’t possibly cut Medicare in a way that you would notice.'”
Republicans really don’t want you to find out that their Big Ugly Bill adds so much to the debt that it will trigger huge cuts to Medicare. pic.twitter.com/fK7mB3Uydx
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) July 30, 2025
Whitehouse refers to sequestration cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which used framework from the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990. That legislation featured PAYGO, standing for “pay as you go” — a budget rule “requiring that tax cuts and mandatory spending increases must be offset (i.e., ‘paid for’) by tax increases or cuts in mandatory spending,” as the Tax Policy Center explains.
In language Whitehouse also uses, the CBO describes sequestration as “automatic spending cuts that occur through the withdrawal of funding for certain (but not all) government programs.”
In May, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) questioned House Budget Committee Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-PA), asking “does this bill trigger statutory PAYGO?”
“Yes,” Boyle replied unequivocally, citing the CBO.
Boyle said at the time, anticipating Whitehouse, that this automatic mandatory triggering of Medicare cuts, despite Medicare not being mentioned in the legislation, is “really the big news.”
Boyle said: “There was a commitment by President Trump that there would be no Medicare cuts in this piece of legislation…and there has been no discussion of Medicare at all — there has been of Medicaid, but not of Medicare. But because of the size of the deficit, because of the PAYGO, that would trigger sequestration of Medicare and it would total over $500 billion.”
Boyle: "This is really the breaking news … because of the size of the deficits, because of the paygo act, that would trigger sequestration of Medicare, and it would total over $500 billion. The official figure that CBO confirms is $535 billion in cuts to Medicare." pic.twitter.com/29mGQj0mgi
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2025
NOTE: The cuts targeted for the agency that administers Medicaid — cuts which are written plainly into the bill, unlike any subsequently triggered sequestration cuts — total $880 billion.
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