The following post, “MAGA Republicans Dodge Questions About Their Own Party’s Plans To Gut Social Safety Net” by Emine Yucel is cross posted from Talking Points Memo:

Some House Republicans in recent weeks have not exactly been shy about their interest in reviving the party’s longtime passion for gutting the social safety net in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection and the coming Republican trifecta.

Reports have surfaced indicating that some congressional Republicans are in talks with Trump advisers about making cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps to offset the cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Others are openly suggesting that Medicare and Social Security may be on the chopping block as part of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s performative venture into government spending cuts through the new Department of Government Efficiency.

But MAGA Republicans on Capitol Hill who recently spoke to TPM were unwilling to be pinned down on the issue.

When asked if he was supportive of the cuts to federal safety net programs being discussed by members of the Republican conference and DOGE enthusiasts, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told TPM that they would look at cuts at other programs first.

“The low hanging fruit is the DoD, which has failed an audit for the seventh year in a row,” Norman said last week. “Low hanging fruit is the DEI things in it.”

Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) expressed a similar sentiment.

“I think there’s so much fraud and abuse in health care, so we can have trillions of offsets for reconciliation just in healthcare,” Spartz told TPM.

The “fraud in health care” line has become a go-to for Republicans in recent weeks. When Trump announced that failed Republican Senate candidate and TV doctor Mehmet Oz would serve as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in his incoming administration, he said Oz would “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.” Since then, Republicans on the Hill have been using the rhetorically creative line to discuss potential spending cuts to tackle in the new Congress, emboldened by the supposed Musk/Ramaswamy mandate to cut down government spending by $2 trillion.

“You look at improper payments — that’s a big issue — where the government sends money to people fraudulently in Medicare, in Medicaid, where they send money fraudulently in unemployment insurance,” House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told CNN in an interview. “All of these improper payments are also on the table.”

“Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, you got to look at all that,” Norman told TPM when asked about the DOGE agenda. “Farm bill, you got to look at it.”

“But the devil is in the details, until you get there and hear both sides … I don’t know,” Norman said, before acknowledging that House Republicans may have a math problem when it comes to corralling lawmakers to support slashing funds from some of these  entitlement programs.

The South Carolina congressman added that House Republicans will instead have to focus on the cuts they know they can get a simple majority on.

“We’ve got to get 218 on the things we know we can …. that’s going to be the key to get anything passed,” Norman told TPM, “Everybody talks conservative when they don’t vote.”

“Social Security is taxpayers money,” he added. “Would I want to take more money away from them? No.”

MAGA loyalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) also told TPM earlier this month she is against cuts to entitlement programs. She also claimed she was not aware of any discussions to do so, despite the fact that some of her colleagues have been very vocal publicly about their intentions.

“I personally am against that but I haven’t heard that,” Greene said.

“The American people are still suffering from high inflation, bad economy, nothing really changed. It’s gonna take time to turn that around. It just always does,” she added. “So I think any kind of cuts like that could hurt the poorest people in the population. So I think we have to be smart about how we do it.”

Spartz, on the other hand, doesn’t think it’s out of the question for Republicans to discuss cuts to Social Security, but she said they’d have to get Democrats on board to pass anything — which is, of course, a complete non-starter.

“At some point we’re gonna have to be adults and talk about Social Security, but it needs to be a conversation on a bipartisan basis,” she told TPM.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol building, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) — who tried and failed to rally Republican senators around a plan to “sunset” Social Security as a policy platform ahead of the 2022 midterms — answered questions last week by elevating a longtime, debunked GOP talking point: that work requirements will make Americans less reliant on the programs.

“I want to make sure we incentivize people getting back to work. When you do that, people don’t need the services this much,” Scott told TPM when asked if he would get behind cuts to entitlement programs. “But I don’t have any interest in cutting the benefits of Medicare, Social Security, things like that.”

During his first term in office, Trump and his administration made work requirements a hallmark of its Medicaid policy proposals. He cleared the way during his first term for a handful of Republican-led states to add work requirements to their Medicaid programs, which ended up being only temporarily successful in one state.

As part of Republicans’ efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term, House Republicans included dramatic cuts to Medicaid spending and eligibility in legislation that would have nixed Obamacare’s individual mandate and employer mandate, among other things. That bill later, famously, failed to pass in the Senate after the late-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) voted against the measure.

While it is unclear what form cuts to social safety nets will take during Trump’s second administration, Democrats on Capitol Hill are sounding the alarm bells over Republicans’ plans, saying they will fight any attempts to slash the programs.

“The Republicans may decide that they are going to twist this government even further in the direction of working great for the billionaires and taking the legs out from underneath everyone else,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told TPM last week. “But they’re going to face a tough fight in Congress to get that done. Democrats will not lay down and play dead over that.”