House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA.) revealed that House Republicans wouldn’t be targeting Medicare or Social Security as part of their negotiations over the debt ceiling.
Speaking to Donald Trump Jr. in the Speaker’s Office for Trump’s podcast “Triggered,” McCarthy asserted, “We won’t touch Medicare or Social Security.”
McCarthy’s comments come as House Republicans eye entitlement programs as a possible target for their demand that federal spending is trimmed. Targeting entitlement cuts contrasts with their promise to include an increase in the debt limit.
On January 19, the U.S. reached its debt ceiling, setting the timer to a deadline to raise the debt limit before the government defaults on its debt.
To extend the deadline until early June, the Treasury Department has chosen to employ “extraordinary measures” to avoid a possible default.
However, despite a looming deadline, Democrats have refused to kowtow to Republicans’ demands, pushing for a clean increase that would likely end in a showdown between the two parties.
But divisions have also emerged within the GOP over whether to target entitlement programs, an area the party chose after former President Donald Trump warned Congressional Republicans last week to focus their demands on spending cuts elsewhere, other than Medicare and Social Security.
In a video on Truth Social, Trump asserted that “under no circumstances” should the GOP “cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security” because of Biden’s “reckless spending spree.”
Trump called for Republicans to ensure pain is “borne by Washington bureaucrats” and not “hard-working American families and American seniors.”
