Donald Trump’s campaign sought Monday to clarify his stance on entitlement programs after President Biden’s campaign zeroed in on the former president’s statement that there is “a lot you can do … in terms of cutting,” as well as “bad management.”
Trump has previously urged fellow Republicans not to cut popular government programs such as Social Security and Medicare, in contrast to some others in the party who say the programs are financially unsustainable without an overhaul. On Monday, Trump’s campaign said he was talking about “cutting waste” when he broached the issue on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Trump whether he had changed his outlook on “entitlements” such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “It seems like something has to be done or else we’re going to be stuck at 120 percent of debt to GDP forever,” Kernen said.
“First of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of, also, the theft and bad management of entitlements,” Trump responded. “Tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement.”
Democrats have campaigned heavily on preserving programs such as Social Security without cuts, and the Biden campaign quickly amplified a clip of Trump’s CNBC remarks on the social media site X. Biden responded on his main account: “Not on my watch.”
Asked to clarify Trump’s statements and whether they meant he is open to cutting Social Security, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung pointed to a Trump War Room post on X. “If you losers didn’t cut his answer short, you would know President Trump was talking about cutting waste,” the post said.
The Trump campaign underscored that position Monday afternoon as the comments gained more attention, sending out an email blast headlined “President Trump Reiterates Protecting Entitlements Like Social Security and Medicare; Would Get Rid of Waste and Fraud.”
Republicans have long sought changes to Medicare and Social Security, and many have advocated cuts to Medicaid, which provides health-care coverage to low-income Americans. But proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare, a federal health insurance program for the elderly, have often proved politically toxic, and many GOP leaders have sworn off changes to those two programs in recent years.
There is broad agreement that the United States cannot keep Social Security and Medicare running in the long term without reducing benefits, lowering payments to the health industry or finding new ways to fund the programs, such as raising taxes. But politicians disagree about how to do it. Trump attacked some of his GOP rivals for the presidential nomination over their support for changes to Social Security such as cutting benefits for younger Americans.
As president, Trump proposed some budget cuts to safety net benefits such as a Social Security program aiding workers with disabilities. Administration officials said in one budget proposal that they would cut spending by testing “new approaches to increase labor force participation.”
Isaac Arnsdorf and Jeff Stein contributed to this report.