ICE and War Funding Can Now Become the Latest Excuse to Gut the Social Safety Net

Congressional Republicans have been musing about the possibility of a second reconciliation package for some time now. The conversations picked up recently after Senate Republicans tried to convince President Donald Trump to drop his objections on a possible Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding deal, promising the president that they will pass the SAVE America Act through the reconciliation process — as a way to circumvent the filibuster.

So far, Republicans have said they want to include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — and possibly even all of DHS — the Department of Defense (DoD) and Trump’s war in Iran in a new reconciliation package. There is also talk of trying to cram the SAVE America Act, or parts of it, into a potential reconciliation package, in order to appease Trump and far-right supporters of the voter suppression bill — though some are not convinced that is possible. Including the bill that requires documentary proof of citizenship in reconciliation will be a tall order as every single provision going into a reconciliation bill must be directly related to the budget and has to comply with strict budget rules.

The upper chamber has been debating the bill on the Senate floor for the past couple of weeks, with no hope of passing it without the help of reconciliation. 

Though discussions are still in early stages, so far, the list of public GOP priorities all require more spending. And Republicans are saying that their second reconciliation bill will also have to include social safety net cuts in order to offset the cost of those priorities — just like they did in the 2025 reconciliation package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), that enacted historic and devastating cuts to popular programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

“We should do what we did in SNAP and Medicaid on the other 78 means-tested welfare programs at a cost of $1.5 trillion,” House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said in an interview with CNBC on Friday. “If we did that, we could offset anything that we want to do that is a national priority, especially including supporting our troops in a time of conflict.”

Republicans have been largely obfuscating when they talk about the cuts to social safety net programs that they are once again planning. They point to the national deficit, saying they will have to offset the new spending with cuts in order to balance the budget out. They hand-wring over self-proclaimed “deficit hawks,” saying those lawmakers will not support a reconciliation package unless any added spending is not offset.

But the rules of reconciliation do not require them to offset the cost of any increased spending within the budget window, which is usually a 10 year period.

“If they put together a bill that, for example, gave money to the Department of Defense and funded ICE for some number of years, there’s no requirement that it needs to be offset,” Michael Linden, senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told TPM. “In fact, the reconciliation bill that they passed last year increased the deficit.”

The reality is, a possible second reconciliation bill will become a vehicle for more social safety net cuts — which Republican lawmakers will spin as necessary as they hide behind the made up need for offsetting their spending on these other priorities like ICE and war funding and possibly the Save America Act, experts tell TPM.

“They want to cut social spending, not because of deficit concerns — although they’ll say there are deficit concerns — but because that’s not the kind of spending they like,” Linden said.

“Republicans always want to cut the social safety net,” a senior congressional aide told TPM. “In their minds, they were put on God’s green earth to cut the size and the depth of these programs … The war with Iran and their inability to pass voter suppression measures gives them that unity of purpose. But I think the real incentive all along is to get another whack at the social safety net.”

“We need to recapitalize our defense budget, and we’re going to pay for all that by squeezing people off of food assistance and health care,” the senior aide added. “No, you guys want to do that anyways, and this is just a convenient excuse for you.”

Pointing to the need for votes from the so-called “deficit hawks” in order to pass the legislation also does not hold up as an excuse under scrutiny, experts pointed out.

“In the Republican caucus, almost, I think pretty much everybody who calls himself a deficit hawk is actually just somebody who objects to social spending,” Linden told TPM. 

“They don’t actually care about the deficit. They care that spending is on stuff that they don’t like. And we know that because they all voted for massive tax cuts that will blow up the deficit last year,” Linden added, pointing out that only two House Republicans refused to support the last reconciliation package.

What it comes down to is “a fundamental disagreement about what the government is and what the government should do,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of Federal Budget Policy at Center for American Progress, told TPM. “The Republicans who are pushing for these cuts fundamentally believe that the government shouldn’t be involved in all these things that the government does to help people.”

“Meanwhile, they are massively funding DHS, which is executing citizens. And funding a war where we’re killing civilians overseas … blowing up elementary schools,” Kogan added.

More recently, Republicans have manufactured a new messaging point to convince Americans that significant cuts need to be made to these social services programs: the idea that there is sweeping “waste, fraud and abuse” happening within these programs. It’s a line Republicans began using when questioned about the major cuts to Medicaid included in Trump’s last budget bill and a concept, real or imagined, that the Trump administration has used to justify withholding federal social services funds from blue states in recent months. 

“There’s other items we’re looking at right now, especially in the areas of fraud and waste and abuse that we’re working through with our members,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Axios about possible health care-related offsets.

But the reality is, Kogan told TPM, only a “super minority of the savings” they got in their 2025 reconciliation package were related to fraud.

“The vast majority of the cuts that they did have absolutely nothing to do with fraud. They were just benefit cuts,” Kogan continued.

There is, of course, also the political question of trying to pass a second reconciliation bill ahead of the midterms, especially one that includes priorities that may be harder to sell to voters, even some members of Trump’s far-right, MAGA base.

“You’re really going to cut health care to pay for an unpopular war?” Linden inquired in a conversation with TPM. The question becomes, he later added, “Are they willing to do such a politically toxic vote this close to the midterms?”

It remains a question whether the Republican caucus at large will be able to come together to pass a second reconciliation bill. Though they only need a simple majority in both chambers to pass a reconciliation package — meaning they will not need Democrats’ votes — almost all Republicans, in both the upper and lower chamber, will have to be onboard with the same package in order to pass it.

“I think another reconciliation bill is pretty unlikely. They barely passed the first one, and that one was carrying, kind of, their number one policy agenda,” Linden told TPM, referring to the tax cuts Republicans extended in the OBBB.