Republicans’ fraught negotiations over the reconciliation bill have become fodder for Democrats campaigning against Trump’s agenda ahead of the 2026 midterms.
House Republicans are in the throes of making tradeoffs to appease the various — often opposing — factions in the party. “If you do more on SALT, you have to find more in savings,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after a meeting between fiscal hawks and blue-state Republicans demanding a more generous state and local tax deduction.
That was after House GOP leaders suggested moving up the timeline for Medicaid work requirements, which currently are set to go into effect in 2029, to make up for the revenue that would be lost with a larger maximum SALT deduction.
“These are the dials, the metaphorical dials I’m talking about,” Johnson said Thursday.
Those dials, Democrats say, are exactly what’s going to turn American voters off the Republicans’ agenda — or at least that’s what Democrats are banking on. Democrats are going through the reconciliation bill line by line to match up where they believe social safety net cuts are being used to pay for tax cuts primarily benefiting high-income taxpayers.
The Congressional Budget Office has previously found that Medicaid work requirements could increase the number of people without insurance while leaving employment numbers unchanged. Meanwhile, increasing the SALT cap would primarily benefit high-income taxpayers in just a handful of counties across the United States.
Democrats have also pointed to House Republicans’ proposal to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by almost $300 billion over the next decade. House Democrats on the Agriculture Committee, where the proposal originated, argued that the cuts could disproportionately hurt rural Americans and stunt job creation.
One Democratic strategist who works on House campaigns, granted anonymity to candidly discuss strategic and messaging plans, contrasted those SNAP cuts with another reconciliation measure that would increase an exemption on estate taxes. That extension, per Joint Committee on Taxation estimates, would cost about $212 billion over the next decade — an amount that’s in the same range as the savings from SNAP rollbacks.
“It is proof positive of a specific example of the larger point, which is House Republicans pushing an agenda to juice up giveaways and tax breaks for multimillionaires of the ultra wealthy, and explicitly leveraging and using working families to pay for it,” the strategist told NOTUS.
It’s a refrain that’s become common among operatives and those at the center of the reconciliation debate in Congress. Democratic House members echoed much of the same messaging in hours-long committee markups last week, where they turned hypothetical complaints about Republicans’ agenda into solidified attacks on the House GOP’s policy priorities.
The frustration over the tradeoffs persisted after the markups, with Democrats on Capitol Hill repeating claims that their counterparts on the other side of the aisle are paying for tax breaks for the wealthy by removing resources for low-income Americans.
“The red line for some Republicans is the SALT deduction, which really just impacts some wealthier Americans. And I think it just shows that a lot of these priorities are out of whack,” Rep. Maxwell Frost — the co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, House Democrats’ messaging arm — told NOTUS on Thursday. “We’re talking about millions of people being taken off Medicaid, millions of people no longer having health care.”
And Rep. Troy Carter said the GOP is “trying to find a way to give tax breaks instead of taking care of Americans who need help.”
It’s an argument that could become especially potent in battleground districts currently held by Republicans, where organizations like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have set their sights. Republicans lost the House majority in 2018 after attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act and passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; in that cycle, Democrats largely campaigned on Republicans’ attempts to cut Medicaid while also benefiting from Trump’s unpopularity.
Party members are already using the argument in some of those districts, including in New York’s 17th district, represented by Rep. Mike Lawler.
Lawler — who has threatened to tank the reconciliation bill without a higher SALT cap — has not explicitly said whether he supports a work requirement tradeoff to make up for the cost of a higher SALT deduction. Though, he told reporters that he supports Medicaid work requirements.
In a press call Thursday where state and local leaders from New York gathered to encourage Lawler to vote no on the reconciliation package because of its Medicaid cuts, Democrat Joe Vogel — a Maryland state legislator who is involved in national organizing — said, “It’s clear that Republicans slashing Medicaid is intended to save money for tax cuts to the wealthy.”
In January, party members named Trump’s freeze on federal loans and grants the “Republican Rip Off.”
For some Democrats, taking a stab at Republicans through the lens of reconciliation is a continuation of that campaign.
“I think generally across the board, we’re all supposed to be here to be serving everyday families and the American people,” the strategist said. “And to the extent that you can point out that Republicans seem to only have one interest in mind, which is ultra-millionaires … it has the benefit of both being true, but also incredibly powerful.”
—
Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.