06.11.25

Thune Joins The Will Cain Show on Fox News

“We want to make this as ambitious and aggressive of an effort as possible to rein in the cost of government, to put a lot of these programs on a more sustainable fiscal path going forward, and to achieve what I think a lot of people never thought was possible, and that is actually seeing a reduction in the size and scope of government.”

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WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) today joined The Will Cain Show on Fox News.

On strengthening Medicaid:

“[T]he provider tax is a good example of something that’s been abused, and it’s been abused particularly by big states like New York and California. It is a racket. I mean, they figured out how to game it. They leverage it to get more federal money – and in the case of California, to cover illegal immigrants. [S]o that’s obviously something that’s front and center.

“The House made a good effort at that and is trying to pare back the use of provider taxes and the way that they’ve been gamed and used in the past, and the Senate is trying to build upon that … It’s an issue that we need to have 51 votes for in the Senate and they need to keep 218 for in the House, so every senator we’re listening to. But at the end of the day, this is a program that’s ripe for reform, the things that we’re doing are going to strengthen it, improve it, and make it available to people for whom it was intended.

“It shouldn’t be available for illegal immigrants. There are people who are ineligible. There are people, able-bodied males who are of working age, there ought to be a work requirement attached to it. These are all reforms to a program that was desperately in need of reform.”

On cutting waste, fraud, and abuse:

“[W]e would like to be able to find spending reductions over and above what the House did. That work is underway. We want to make this as ambitious and aggressive of an effort as possible to rein in the cost of government, to put a lot of these programs on a more sustainable fiscal path going forward, and to achieve what I think a lot of people never thought was possible, and that is actually seeing a reduction in the size and scope of government.

“That’s something that hasn’t happened in about three decades here. This will be the biggest spending reduction in mandatory spending in history, and so we’re working to that end.”

On the state and local tax deduction:

“SALT was one of the best reforms we did. I was a part of authoring the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and it was a reform that not only saved about $1.2 trillion, but it got us out of the practice of having low-tax states subsidize high-tax states, and so there isn’t much interest in the Senate in going back on that.

“Now, having said that, they need the votes in the House. We understand that, and we’re looking at ways that we can adjust and dial those provisions that hopefully we’ll be able to keep the votes together in the House, but also do something to dial back the impact of this.

“It was $353 billion … they agreed on in the House. And you divide that, of course, by the number of members of Congress who care about that issue in the House, it gets to be a pretty high number. And there just isn’t interest in doing this in the Senate. So … that’s an issue … that we’re going to have to continue to work.”