Beware the budget bill’s Trojan horse

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine Political Commentary

It’s budget season in Washington, folks. Here’s what’s going on: Last week, House Republicans released their budget resolution — a blueprint for enacting the Trump-Musk-Project 2025 agenda — and voted on party lines to advance it out of the House Budget Committee.

Its next stop will be a full vote in the House, and if it’s passed there, it’ll come to the Senate. So let’s talk about what’s in this budget:

• Massive cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP.

• Head Start programs being shut down.

• Community health clinics being shut down.

Reduced staff for veterans’ hospitals and clinics.

Stand against the GOP budget. The advertised purposes of this resolution are border security and defense. But this is a trojan horse.

I know that because we always pass bipartisan defense funding bills. And we had a bipartisan border security bill last year that Trump forced Republicans to abandon. So this budget bill is not needed to address defense or border funding.

Inside the trojan horse, we see clearly that this budget is an effort to dramatically cut support for programs that help everyday Virginians and everyday Americans so that those funds can be directed into tax cuts for the wealthy.

The dollars “saved” by cutting critical services like food stamps and Medicaid — combined with the tariffs that Trump is laying on American families that will make their lives more

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expensive — will go into a big pot that gets used to fund tax cuts for the rich via 4.5 trillion dollars of tax cuts.

I will fight this — I’ll offer amendments, I’ll try to protect Medicaid and other safety net programs, and I’ll work to get the bottom of what this budget would actually do to working people in our country.

But right now, let’s just be candid about what’s going on here: This is an effort to amass savings off the backs of everyday people, combine it with tariff revenue, and direct all that money into tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Republicans can’t just trick people while agencies are being shut down left and right and programs that everyday people rely on are being ruthlessly cut — we see right through it, and we won’t stand by and let it happen.

If you agree that we need a budget that will actually help people, not hurt their lives and livelihoods, add your name to my petition to demand a common-sense budget that keeps critical safety net programs intact.

Thanks for reading and for speaking up.

Tim Kaine is the junior U. S. senator from Virginia and a former Vuce Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.