GOP Drops Federal Medicaid Ban On Trans Care From “Big Beautiful Bill”

In a sudden and much-needed victory for LGBT rights, Senate Republicans abandoned their efforts to ban federal Medicaid funding of gender-affirming care for trans people.

Photo by Elijah Mears on Unsplash

As per NOTUS reporter Oriana González on Bluesky, the current draft of the federal reconciliation bill—which seeks to align the budget bill passed in the House with that of the Senate—has discarded the provision banning federal Medicaid from funding for gender-affirming care for transgender people. It also appears the language redefining ‘sex’ has been removed.

Democrats had been gearing up for a fight via a vote-a-rama, which is a rapidfire lawmaking (and more specifically, amendment-adding) Senate event. Last week, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, invoked the Byrd Rule to challenge the anti-trans Medicaid ban, after the Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said this would violate the procedural code—which blocks “extraneous” policies from clogging up a budget bill.

Despite this, Republicans left the provisions in the bill, and it looked like Democrats would need to invoke a point of order to remove it.

“The Parliamentarian has made clear that reconciliation can not be used to manipulate state provider tax policies, which would have resulted in massive Medicaid cuts that hurt kids, seniors, Americans with disabilities and working families,” Wyden said in a press release. “Republicans are hellbent on using the reconciliation process to capture ideological trophies that will leave Americans worse off and fly in the face of their self-proclaimed commitment to states’ rights.”

However, Wyden never got the chance to raise the point of order—it seems that the Senate GOP simply dropped the rule from the bill at the last moment, likely because they lacked the votes to push it through on party lines alone. It is among a laundry list of proposals that have been subjected to campaigns by constituents pressuring legislators to block some of the most insidious portions of the bill.

MSNBC and Xtra Magazine columnist Katelyn Burns also posted that, according to her sources close to the matter, Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Congresswoman Sarah McBride of Delaware worked behind the scenes to get the item tossed and unite Democrats in anticipation of a vote on it.

However, the fight still isn’t over. The House must still review the bill and the Senate amendments for final consideration, and constituents should contact their representatives about the issues they care about. While the explicitly anti-trans measures were struck, other deeply troubling ones were greenlit by the Parliamentarian—such as additional funds for Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and funding cuts to food stamps.

“The fact remains that this bill belongs in the trash,” said David Stacy, the Human Rights Campaign’s vice president for government affairs, to The Advocate. “It continues to include devastating cuts to health care programs—including Medicaid—that would disproportionately harm the LGBTQ+ community, all so the already rich can receive huge tax cuts.”