At a press gaggle, Speaker Johnson discussed the possible spending cuts in the eventual Republican budget.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Can you hear some areas of spending cuts you're looking at, because you said you've been working on this for a while, so you must know where you're going to cut.
00:07Yeah, we have big menus of options and items in 11 different committees of jurisdiction, and one of the big ones is Energy and Commerce, because you have such a broad jurisdiction, and that's where you'll be looking at.
00:19You know, Medicaid, for example, which is the thing that the Democrats are trying to, frankly, lie to the American people about, no one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who's duly owed.
00:30What we've talked about is returning work requirements.
00:32So, for example, you don't have able-bodied young men on a program that's designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled.
00:39They're draining resources from people who actually do that.
00:42So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.
00:51We have a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid, just one tiny example.
00:55The estimate is $51 billion a year, and Medicaid is lost to fraud.
01:00That's unconscionable.
01:01We now have, with the doge efforts and with new algorithms and with new oversight responsibilities and opportunities, we have the ability to carve that out.
01:09We have a responsibility to do it.
01:11That estimate, by some people, some estimates say that is very low.
01:15It's actually much higher than that.
01:16So we're going to go through, carve out, find these savings, low-hanging fruit, and examples like that.
01:21There's a lot of it in the federal government.
01:23I mean, look, we have a $36 trillion federal debt right now.
01:26We're running deficits every year.
01:28It's not the way to run our country.
01:30We need to return to fiscal sanity, and that's what the Republican Party represents.
01:34And you know what?
01:35That's good for every American.
01:36But, sir, the instructions are $800 billion for these committees.
01:42Are you saying there is $800 billion in fraud, waste, and abuse for these programs?
01:47I'm saying that the categories of fraud, waste, and abuse, in addition to the other areas that we've been looking at for almost a year now,
01:54that we can find well more than $800 billion in savings, and we will, and that's what we've committed to.