'Panic button': JD Vance blasted after calling $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts 'minutiae'

Vice President JD Vance, who once cast himself as a champion of rural America and working-class families, emerged late Monday to defend President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” as it floundered during a Senate vote-a-rama—amid critics’ accusations of pork and prejudice. The margin is expected to be so close that Vance is now at the U.S. Capitol to be on hand to cast the deciding vote if necessary.

“The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The OBBB fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass,” VP Vance wrote on social media.

Experts have said, and critics have noted, that immigrants actually reduce the federal deficit by about $1 trillion each decade, because of the work they perform and the taxes they pay. Few undocumented immigrants are able to access federal social safety net benefits.

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But it was this tweet that seemed to attract the most pushback:

“Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

Critics blasted the vice president.

“Here is the vice president of the U.S. saying Trump’s signature bill that kicks ~17M people off of health care, takes food away from poor children, adds $4T to the debt + kills the clean energy industry only really matters because it helps ICE detain and deport brown people,” explained HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery.

“Thousands of projected deaths per year is ‘immaterial,'” wrote Vox senior correspondent and editor Dylan Scott.

“Expert calculate that the Big Ugly Bill will kill 51,000 people EACH YEAR,” observed Adam Cohen, vice chair, Lawyers for Good Government. “The CBO determined it will cause 11.8 million Americans to lose Medicaid,” he added.

“Unions charge it will cost millions of jobs,” he continued, “And it will literally take food from hungry kids But-to JD Vance This is immaterial.”

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“JD the argument you’re making is that cutting millions of Americans from Medicaid the next few years will be obviated by enforcing on immigration more. If a certain number of unauthorized people are kicked out, that won’t get people more health insurance. It’s not minutiae,” warned journalist Zaid Jilani.

“The CBO projects that the immigration provisions cost taxpayers more than $125 billion,” noted attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “Meanwhile, Medicaid alone is being cut by nearly $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion), with millions of Americans losing access to healthcare. So impoverish the country for mass deportations?”

“People are rightly noting that kicking millions off of Medicaid is not ‘minutiae’, but the premise is wrong here too,” noted Ernie Tedeschi, former Chief Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisors. “Of the reasons to deport undocumented immigrants, federal fiscal health is one of the worst ones. CBO found they *lower* deficits by ~$1T over the next 10 years.”

Economist Tony Annett wrote: “This awful man scapegoats immigrants to defend the largest upward redistribution in history.”

“No, deportations are removing net taxpayers,” warned David J. Bier, Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “The GOP is living in an anti-immigrant delusion. Even if you ended all benefits to noncitizens and kept their taxes (my favored approach), it wouldn’t come anywhere close to ending the budget deficit. The threat is population decline!”

Crain’s Detroit senior reporter Dustin P. Walsh called Vance’s remarks “demonstrably wrong.”

“There is countless evidence illegal immigrants actually boost coffers. You can have philosophical arguments about legal process, etc. but a fiscal argument is just inaccurate,” Walsh added.

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller asked: “If the only thing that matters is the mass deportations…why don’t you just do a bill funding mass deportations?”

“This is what hitting the panic button looks like,” observed Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy.