HELENA — On Thursday, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives approved a budget framework – an initial step toward advancing the Trump administration’s budget priorities.
(Watch the video to hear from Montana's U.S. House members about the budget process.)
As part of the process, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated they would seek at least $1.5 trillion in spending reductions in the coming years, to help offset the cost of new proposals – including an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, set to expire at the end of this year.
“If Congress doesn't take action, what's going to happen is we're going to face the largest tax increase in the history of this country – and it affects Montana,” said Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, who represents Montana’s western U.S. House district.
Zinke was at the State Capitol Friday, testifying for the confirmation of Montana DNRC Director Amanda Kaster, who formerly worked for him in Congress and at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Zinke told MTN he’s confident the House can find most of the savings they’ll need to achieve by cutting “waste, fraud and abuse.” He said that could include looking at reported improper payments in programs like Medicaid, as well as tightening work requirements.
“Certainly there's areas we can be more efficient and save money, but if there's one out of five transactions in Medicaid that are fraudulent, we need to look at that,” he said. “The goal is to find $2.5 trillion of savings. That's over ten years. So on a $7 trillion budget a year, I think we can find $250 billion a year in savings.”
Republican Rep. Troy Downing, who represents the state’s eastern congressional district, also believes Congress can make the needed savings primarily by finding efficiencies.
“We need to make sure that money is going to things that are in the interests of the United States of America – the interests of our people – and making sure that we're being stewards of taxpayer dollars,” he said. “So I'm excited about this next process. It’s going to be difficult, a lot of moving parts, but I'm excited and I think we're going to get there.”
Downing held a telephone town hall this week. He says he heard from constituents worried about cuts to programs like Medicaid, but he argues their concerns are based on “false narratives.”
“Anybody that is on that program that is lawfully due those benefits is going to continue – the administration's been very clear on that, Congress has been very clear on that,” he said. “I think that you can have a program that's just got huge amounts of misspent money, misspent bureaucracy, where you can clean all that up without actually taking a benefit from anybody who is lawfully due that benefit.”
For the last few months, most of the specific proposals for reducing federal spending have come from the DOGE effort led by Elon Musk. Zinke says he believes it’s been positive overall.
“Whether you love Elon Musk or hate him or love to hate him, he was able to do what I wasn't able to do as a secretary and a congressman,” he said. “It would have taken thousands of people thousands of days without incorporating some technology to look at the grants – and out of the factory came atrocious amount of abuse.”
However, he believes there have been issues with the rollout, pointing to federal grants that he says were initially canceled because they contained keywords linked to climate change and diversity.
“But the fundamental part about the grant is still good,” Zinke said. “For instance, there were grants for clearing dead and dying trees that had climate change written all over it, and it's really about managing the forests. So I'm going through a lot of those grant applications with the Forest Service, with the Interior Department, and making sure that those grants that are good, stay – and quite frankly, the grants that were bad, I think they'll get eliminated; the grants that are on the fence will have more scrutiny, as they should.”
Downing also said he thought Musk’s campaign had been a success.
“There's money being spent that's very meaningful, very important that we need to preserve, but we need to figure out how we can root out that waste, that fraud, that abuse,” he said. “I think a lot of the stuff that's been disclosed over this process – we're all shaking our heads, had no idea that the United States of America was spending money on these programs or how much or the fact that there really weren't any checks and balances to understand who was authorizing those payments.”
The vote this week was only a starting point, and the House will now have to beging the work of actually putting together the details of the legislative package.
