The first 100 days of President Trump’s return to office have been as relentless and punishing as we anticipated and then some. The core of the Trump administration’s agenda is cruelly simple: to dismantle public programs to enrich the powerful and punish the most underserved. His administration has deployed a “shock and awe strategy,” flooding the zone with executive orders, budget proposals, and agency actions designed to sow fear, confusion, and exhaustion. This is by design. They want us to feel overwhelmed. But here’s what they didn’t account for: we are not intimidated. We’re prepared and more determined than ever.
Medicaid is under direct attack, not because it’s broken, but because it works. Medicaid and the related Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provide quality health care coverage to over 80 million people in communities across the United States. Without Medicaid, health care would be out of reach for millions of low-income children and adults, pregnant people, older adults, and people with disabilities. It allows them to get the health care they need to get and stay healthy.
But, President Trump and his congressional allies are rushing legislation that will require deep, structural cuts to Medicaid in order to give tax breaks to corporations and billionaires, and pour billions into militarized immigration enforcement. The President’s congressional allies are reviving budget gimmicks that will terminate Medicaid coverage by cutting state funding, imposing work requirements, ending taxes on providers which help fund the state’s share of Medicaid expenditures, or a combination of these proposals. Regardless of the mechanism, if implemented, these reckless changes will strip care from millions and throw our health care system into chaos.
Simply put, you can’t cut Medicaid without cutting people.
The attacks on people haven’t stopped at Medicaid. Queer folks, people of color, people with disabilities, and immigrants are under direct attack as the Trump administration rolls back the rights and supports these communities have fought hard to secure. By systematically targeting so-called “woke ideology” and DEI in all sectors of public and private life, they are undertaking a deliberate strategy to marginalize, intimidate, and silence.
The Trump administration has also gone after the infrastructure that supports a free and just society. Nonprofits, especially those working on immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and racial equity, have been targeted or threatened with politically motivated audits, investigations, and funding cuts. Legal organizations, public interest law firms, and private firms, including those providing pro bono support to underserved communities, have faced intimidation tactics designed to cower and punish those who defend our nation’s fragile social safety net in court.
And yet, even in the face of this assault from many directions, we are not only standing strong but also building power.
The National Health Law Program (NHeLP) is leading the fight to protect and defend Medicaid. We are on Capitol Hill educating members of Congress about Medicaid’s critical role in their states and districts, including Medicaid’s role in supporting rural health systems, health care in schools, and local economies and the workforce. We are coordinating strategy across coalitions and supporting our state-based partners whose advocacy drives resistance in communities nationwide, including in California, where NHeLP and our partners are rallying to protect Medi-Cal, the nation’s largest Medicaid program covering 15 million Californians. We are also leveraging our communications capacity to push back hard on the pernicious myth that Medicaid is wasteful or subject to fraud. There are not billions of dollars in waste to cut from Medicaid; that is unless one believes that providing health care to one in five Americans is waste.
Just weeks ago, nearly 200 advocates from across the country gathered at NHeLP’s national conference. We met in person to strategize, share lessons, and strengthen the bonds that hold this movement together. It was a reminder that we are not alone and we are not backing down. With the support of our foundation partners and generous supporters, we have hired two new attorneys for our litigation team, two new policy experts for our federal advocacy team, and a new attorney to support our work in California. We have also added a new state partner to our network of Health Law Partnerships.
This moment is hard. They want it to be hard. That’s the point of a “flood the zone” approach: to make us feel like giving up. But we have weathered these storms before. We have endured before. We have won before. And we will again because the stakes are too high to do anything else.
We are not backing down. We are doubling down. We fight because access to health care is critical for the well-being of our families, communities, and country. We fight because we all deserve the chance to thrive. We fight because our future is on the line.
