U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD-08) discussed the recently-passed federal spending bill and other current impacts of President Donald Trump’s Administration during County Executive Marc Elrich’s media briefing Wednesday.
“The public opinion polls already show it’s one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation that any president has ever advanced,” Raskin said.
“The county is unpacking the impact of the new federal spending bill… the worst of the cuts won’t take place in some cases until 2027,” Elrich said. “Very clever of the Republicans to make sure that the worst things they’re doing, they’re doing after the election, but when they do it, it’s going to have a devastating effect to millions of Americans on the local level.”
Medicaid
“Nearly two out of every three Montgomery County nursing home residents are supported by Medicaid funding, and without Medicaid funding, it’s likely that some of the nursing homes aren’t going to survive,” Elrich said.
Raskin said 14 million Americans face losing their Medicaid — “That’s the cold, bitter reality at the center of this thing,” he said.
“More than 45% of kids in Maryland depend on Medicaid in one form or another. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of children who are going to be affected.”
Tens of thousands of county residents are on Medicaid, Elrich previously said.
Raskin also noted tens of millions of Americans will face SNAP benefit cuts, nutrition cuts, and loss of food programs. Elrich said, “The federal tax bill cuts funding to fight hunger and instead funds things like ICE raids, prisons, and cuts in taxes for billionaires.”
The bill will add $3.5 trillion to the national debt, Raskin said, “So it’s not like there’s even any fiscal austerity here.”
Deportations
Raskin said the country is going “way, way beyond” deporting violent felons.
“Now we’re at the point of ICE agents in unmarked cars appearing in people’s communities and neighborhoods, masked, without any identification, conducting warrantless arrests, completely in violation of the Fourth Amendment, just sweeping people off of the street.”
Elrich said to date in Montgomery County, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests have been scattered and on a small-scale — “we have not had situations where people are going into workplaces and taking all the workers… most of the takings have been targeted. At least that’s what we’ve been told.”
But, Elrich said ICE has also taken people as “collateral damage.” He said the county has not seen anything on the scale of the raids in Los Angeles.
Elrich previously said the county will not obstruct ICE arrests — “We are not putting our police or our people between ICE agents and the people they’re coming for,” he said in January.
Federal Jobs
“We’ve already been punished severely by the loss of thousands of federal jobs,” Raskin said. He added that, “We were able to reverse some of that with the litigation about probationary workers, but a lot of those people are still in trouble, and lots of aid workers have lost their jobs.”
“NIH workers have been under attack. Treasury workers have been under attack. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau workers have been under attack,” he said. And on Friday, more than 1,300 Department of State workers lost their jobs.
“On top of these mass layoffs taking place throughout the federal government, we get all of the cutbacks in benefits.”
The Epstein Files
“We are all for making the Epstein files public,” Raskin said. “We are all for transparency.”
“[Donald Trump] did promise to release those files, and he should. I just hope that some of our Republican colleagues will begin to rethink some of their other entanglements with Donald Trump’s agenda.”
Raskin said Republicans “do seem to have broken a little bit over the Epstein files, because Donald Trump, for whatever reason, wants to sweep everything under the rug right now after campaigning on release of the Epstein files. And he, of course, was friends with Epstein. Nobody’s denied that. There’s all kinds of photos and video of them together.”
Next Steps
To try to counteract the federal cuts, Raskin said congressmembers would advance amendments in committee bill markup sessions and on the floor, “to the extent that they will allow us to get amendments on the floor.”
“And I know and trust that our senators will be doing the exact same thing over on the Senate side, on the floor, and just making [Republicans] vote over and over again to support these Medicaid cuts, if that’s what they want to do, or giving them the chance to turn around on it.”
Raskin said, “Democrats in Congress are going to have to run on repealing all of these devastating cuts in the 2026 election.”
