Republican lawmaker slams Dems for ‘hypocrisy’ over state budget Medicaid cuts
Washington state Democrats have sharply criticized the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to federal Medicaid funding.
Now a state Republican lawmaker is calling them out for “hypocrisy.”
For months, Gov. Bob Ferguson has banged the drum against against federal Medicaid reductions in H.R. 1. Despite blowback, President Donald Trump signed the far-reaching tax and policy bill into law July 4.
But state Rep. Travis Couture, an Allyn Republican, says the budget that Ferguson approved in May slashes more than $782 million from Medicaid: $446 million in federal dollars and $336.5 million in state matching funding.
Close to 95% of those reductions hit services for seniors and people with disabilities, general medical care and long-term care assistance, according to an Aug. 18 news release from Couture’s office.
“You can blame them for stuff you don’t like; I mean, that’s totally fair,” Couture told McClatchy in a call Aug. 18. “But to blame the federal government for things that you are literally doing the exact same thing ... I just think it’s total hypocrisy.”
McClatchy has reached out to the governor’s office seeking comment.
Democrats say that Republicans are attempting to deflect after getting pushback from constituents over the law that their congressional counterparts delivered to Trump’s desk. The legislation hasn’t exactly been popular, polls show.
Ferguson’s office has cited projections showing that the state will lose between $3 billion and $5 billion in federal Medicaid dollars per year because of One Big Beautiful Bill. And at least 250,000 Medicaid Washingtonians are estimated to lose coverage.
The news release from Couture, who’s the state House Republican budget lead, says that he’s citing new data from the nonpartisan Office of Program Research (OPR).
McClatchy contacted OPR for verification of Couture’s figures. Staff director Jill Reinmuth directed the media company to contact the House Public Records Office for help accessing public records.
Pressed to confirm the numbers provided by Couture, Reinmuth replied via email that OPR isn’t able to “provide further comment beyond what may be available from the House Public Records Office” and publicly available information on the state’s Fiscal Information website.
Couture’s office forwarded McClatchy an email from OPR showing its analysis of the resulting Medicaid reductions.
State Rep. Nicole Macri, vice chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said the information that Couture solicited isn’t new news. Democratic budget writers had said they were taking a balanced approach to addressing a multi-billion-dollar budget shortfall, the Seattle Democrat noted. That included “painful and challenging” cuts to medical services and Medicaid.
Macri said health-care investment is the second-largest area in the state budget, behind K-12 education. She argued that it’s hard to manage any budget shortfall in the state without looking at health care.
“But I’m a little confused by why Rep. Couture is coming out with this messaging now,” she said, “and I can only guess that it is because of the heat that Republicans are taking because of H.R. 1.”
Couture said that in the last days of this year’s legislative session, he only had 24 hours to view the final budget before the public did. At more than 1,300 pages, it was a lot to comb through, he said.
Medicaid doesn’t appear as a single line item in the budget, making cuts difficult to quantify, he said. So, Couture said, he asked OPR to analyze such reductions; he recently got the numbers back.
Couture initially thought the state budget’s Medicaid cuts might be in the neighborhood of $200 million in four years, so he said it was “shocking” to learn that it was really “$782 million in two years.”
“That blew my eyes wide open when I saw that,” Couture said.
Macri pointed out that H.R. 1 makes nearly $1 trillion in federal Medicaid cuts over the next 10 years. The state’s 5% uninsured rate is expected to at least double, too, she said.
“So yeah,” she added, “he’s scrambling to point a finger back at state Democrats on this.”
Democratic state Sen. June Robinson, lead budget writer for the upper chamber, said in an emailed statement that the federal law will devastate rural hospitals, families who depend on Medicaid and many basic services. State lawmakers, unlike Congress, are required to balance a budget, and they’d been open about pursuing both revenue and cuts to do so, the Everett Democrat said.
Such cuts included several hundred million dollars per year from Medicaid, she added, which was “an incredibly difficult decision for budget writers.” Still, that represents a fraction of the billions of dollars that Washington will lose each year under H.R. 1.
“They (Republicans) don’t want people to connect the dots between their party’s actions in D.C. and the very real consequences here at home: closed rural hospitals, empty food banks, and families without care,” Robinson said. “But Washingtonians are paying attention, and they know who is responsible.”
Both Couture and Macri have said their respective caucuses are working on crafting solutions heading into the 2026 session.
This story was originally published August 19, 2025 at 2:14 PM with the headline "Republican lawmaker slams Dems for ‘hypocrisy’ over state budget Medicaid cuts."
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