Minnesota’s Republican congressional delegation all voted to approve the U.S. House’s budget proposal Tuesday night, a vote some state Republican legislators attempted to inform when they urged their federal colleagues to consider the expected harm to Minnesota from Medicaid cuts.

The House measure, which is designed to promote President Donald Trump’s agenda, includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in reduced federal spending over a decade. Among the proposals in the budget to accomplish these tax breaks and spending reductions are proposed massive cuts to Medicaid and a potential gutting of the Affordable Care Act.

Last week, more than a dozen state Republican legislators sent a letter to the Republican congressional delegation — Reps. Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber — asking them to consider the proposed cuts of $880 billion to Medicaid and how they could affect low-income and disabled Minnesotans.

The letter — signed by Sens. Jim Abeler, Bill Lieske, Carla Nelson, Paul Utke, Mark Koran and Glenn Gruenhagen and Reps. Danny Nadeau, Joe Schomacker, Jeff Backer, Aaron Repinski, Joe McDonald, Dave Baker, Steve Gander and Bernie Perryman — said state Republicans would not be able to make up for the proposed cuts in the state’s budget.

“Minnesota stands a leader in providing access to care and containing costs and now stands vulnerable to unworkable funding reductions with some of what is being proposed in the federal budget,” the letter said. “Drastic reductions to Medicaid funding have the potential to impact the 1.4 million people we serve and place incredible pressure on our overall budget.”

Minnesota has 1.4 million people enrolled in Medicaid, including 650,000 children and 125,000 people with disabilities, according to 2023 data from the state Department of Health. The state Republicans wrote that the “only choice available” if the proposed cuts are passed is to raise local property taxes drastically or withdraw services.

The notice from state Republicans comes as the Legislature will be tasked with passing a budget with a $5 billion budget deficit projected by 2028. The Legislature must pass a budget by July to avoid a government shutdown.

The letter signed off with a request for the GOP House members in Washington: “Please remind our good leaders in Washington that simply cutting the budget is not going to take away our responsibilities to the aged, those with disabilities and mental health needs, children and the poor.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune said it sought comment Tuesday from Emmer, Stauber, Fischbach and Finstad. Their offices did not respond to the newspaper’s request.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum thanked the state Republicans on X on Monday, a day before the vote.

“Thanks to the 14 GOP Minnesota Legislators who recognize the damage the U.S. House GOP budget would cause,” she said. “It’s wrong to cut Medicaid — a healthcare lifeline for over a million Minnesota seniors, disabled, and children — to give more tax breaks to billionaires like Elon Musk.”

Sen. Majority Leader Erin Murphy released a statement Wednesday morning saying it is time for her GOP legislative colleagues to “get serious about the harm President Trump and his chosen crony are wreaking in Minnesota.”

“Every Republican sent to Washington to fight for Minnesota voted for this giveaway to the richest 1 percent, paid for by the rest of us,” she said. “It will be exceptionally harmful to our rural health care providers and farmers. President Trump counts this as a ‘win’ when we know it is a heavy loss for millions of people in Minnesota and across the country.”

The Minnesota Teacher of the Year candidates have been narrowed down to 31 semifinalists, including three St. Paul teachers.

John Horton, at J.J. Hill Montessori, Amanda Jagdeo at Hamline Elementary School, and Kong Vang at Washington Technology Magnet School, were among the semifinalists.

Other semifinalists include Stacy Bartlett at Stillwater Area Public Schools; Ryan Collins at Mahtomedi Public Schools; Ted Erickson at Anoka-Hennepin School District; Megan Frantzen at South St. Paul Public Schools; Zoe Kourajian at Mounds View Public Schools; Katherine Norrie at Northfield Public Schools and Sean Padden and Averi Turner at Roseville Area Schools.

Originally 142 candidates were nominated for the honor, a group narrowed down by an independent panel of 21 community leaders.

The panel will review semifinalist portfolios and video submissions in mid-March before selecting 10 finalists.

Current Minnesota Teacher of the Year, Tracy Byrd will announce the 2025 Teacher of the Year at the program’s banquet on May 4 at the St. Paul RiverCentre at 175 W Kellogg Blvd.

Education Minnesota is a statewide educators union that organizes the Teacher of the Year program. Candidates can be pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade, early childhood family education and adult basic education teachers from public or private schools, according to the release.

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By LISA MASCARO, KEVIN FREKING and LEAH ASKARINAM, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now that House Republicans have passed an ambitious budget blueprint for President Donald Trump’s agenda, it’s time for the hard work of turning ideas for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion of slashed spending into a bill that lawmakers warn could bring intense changes to Americans back home.

Republicans are insisting the costs of the tax breaks be partly paid for by the steep reductions in federal government spending as a way to ensure the nation’s $36 trillion debt load doesn’t balloon to dangerous levels.

But deciding what to cut — health care, food stamps, green energy, government regulations or student aid — is a politically agonizing choice.

And it’s not just the House that has to agree. GOP senators have their own plans. Their priority is to make the tax cuts permanent, rather than have them expire in a decade, as the House proposed. GOP senators see that as non-negotiable, but it would skyrocket the costs.

Eventually, the House and Senate must vote on a final package.

“We have a lot of hard work ahead of us,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said after the late Tuesday vote.

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It’s the start of a weeks-long — if not months — slog that is expected to consume Congress as Republicans try to deliver on Trump’s agenda and their own campaign promises.

Trump met Wednesday with Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune at the White House, after Republicans also met with Treasury Scott Bessent. Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles huddled privately with GOP senators at the Capitol.

Republicans say if they fail to act, the lower tax rates first approved in 2017 will expire, which would amount to a massive tax hike for many Americans. They believe keeping the tax cuts in place will partly pay for themselves, unleashing economic growth and fresh revenues, though others say those projections are optimistic.

Democrats put up stiff opposition against the House GOP plan — one lawmaker dashed from California after a week’s stay in the hospital and another returned to Washington for the vote with her newborn son. Democrats will spend the weeks ahead warning Americans what’s at stake.

“Republicans and Trump promised to lower costs on day one, and instead their priorities have been focused on ripping health care away from kids, moms and others who need it most,” said Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., cradling her 4-week-old son, Sam.

“All to fund tax breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk while increasing our national deficit by trillions of dollars,” she said. “How can anyone show their face in their district after voting yes for this?”

Trump, during a freewheeling Cabinet meeting Wednesday at the White House, insisted he will not touch the nation’s premier safety net programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — but seek ways to root out what Republicans call waste, fraud and abuse.

“It won’t be ‘read my lips’ anymore,” Trump said, echoing President George H.W. Bush’s no new taxes pledge. “We’re not going to touch it.”

But the math doesn’t fully add up.

Without steep cuts to federal programs, Republicans won’t be able to claim the savings they need to offset the costs of the tax breaks. And without offsetting the costs, conservative GOP lawmakers won’t want to vote for the final package.

After the White House meeting, Johnson said Trump’s tariff policies and his new plan for $5 million gold cards for immigration “will change the math” as the lawmakers get down to work.

Johnson said he, too, wanted to make the tax cuts permanent. “That’s our goal.”

Now that the House has acted, it’s the Senate’s move.

Thune said it’s “to be determined” when the Senate would act. “It’s complicated,” Thune said. “It’s hard. Nothing about this is going to be easy.”

Initially approved during Trump’s first term, many of the tax cuts were temporary and are expiring later this year. Keeping them would cost $4.5 trillion over the next decade.

And that’s not counting the new tax cuts that Trump is asking for. The president wants to eliminate taxes on tips, which was a signature campaign promise, and has also talked about getting rid of taxes on overtime pay as well as Social Security benefits. Those would add to the price tag.

As GOP senators insist on making the tax cuts permanent, one idea supported by the Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Crapo of Idaho is to simply use a different accounting process.

It involves essentially treating the tax cuts as what’s called “existing policy,” which would mean they are not a new cost, and therefore would not need to be offset by cuts elsewhere.

Thune backs the idea, though it has run into resistance from other Republicans, including conservative House deficit hawks.

But Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, top Democrat on the Finance committee, said Republicans are engaging in “funny math.”

“It’s all a big game in order to get more money to the billionaires through their tax breaks,” Wyden said.

With reductions to the Pentagon off the table, Republicans are hunting for cost-cutting across the non-defense side of the budget. The next biggest pot of money available is the nation’s health care programs.

The House GOP’s bill directed the committee that handles Medicaid health care spending to come up with $880 billion in savings over the decade, which would be the bulk of what’s needed to offset the cost of the tax breaks.

Republicans insist there will be no direct cuts to people who receive their health care through Medicaid, some 80 million adults and children, and that they only will target waste, fraud and abuse to make it more efficient.

Mostly, Republicans talk about imposing work requirements or removing able-bodied men from the government-run Medicaid program. Doing that would save a small portion of what’s needed, some $100 billion over the decade.

For bigger savings, Republicans consider altering the way the federal government provides Medicaid money to the states. Some 40 states expanded their Medicaid programs with the Affordable Care Act, when Obamacare provided money to enroll people in the program.

The Republicans have also directed the House Agriculture Committee to come up with some $230 billion in savings. One likely place it will turn is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. GOP chair Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania said food stamps won’t be cut.

Democrats are having none of this, and advocacy groups have started showing up at town hall meetings to protest what’s happening.

At the same time, key GOP senators are still pushing their smaller $340 billion package to provide the Trump administration with money it needs for border security and its mass deportation agenda. Their idea was to include the tax cuts in a second package later in the year.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is threatening Minnesota officials with legal action if they don’t comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at banning transgender athletes in women’s sports.

In a Tuesday letter to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minnesota State High School League Executive Director Erich Martens, Bondi said the state should be “on notice” that the U.S. Justice Department is ready to take action. Officials in California and Maine also received a warning letter.

The Trump Administration asserts that allowing people born male who identify as women to participate in women’s school sports violates Title IX, a federal law banning sex discrimination in education.

The president’s Feb. 5 executive order allows federal agencies to enforce the administration’s interpretation of Title IX, though some states and high school sports groups have said they would not comply.

“This Department of Justice will defend women and does not tolerate state officials who ignore federal law,” Bondi said in a statement. “We will leverage every legal option necessary to ensure state compliance with federal law and President Trump’s executive order protecting women’s sports.”

Bondi noted that the Department of Justice has already sued other states for defying federal orders. Earlier in February, they sued Illinois and New York, accusing the states of defying federal immigration policy.

On Feb. 12 the U.S. Department of Education started investigating Minnesota and California high school sports organizations because they planned to go against the federal government’s new policy.

Attorney General of Minnesota Keith Ellison. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Earlier this month the Minnesota State High School League, the governing body for state school athletics, said following the order likely would violate the state Human Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the state Constitution, which includes protections for different sexual orientations and gender identities. Though the group said it would cooperate with the Title IX investigation.

The league sought advice from Ellison, who later issued an opinion supporting their stance. In a Wednesday statement he maintained that Bondi and Trump are “wrong on the law” and said he was ready to defend the state against federal challenges.

“I think it’s morally wrong to persecute a small minority group, transgender youth, with the full weight (of) the U.S. Department of Justice just to express prejudice against a vulnerable and often persecuted group of students,” he said in a statement. “I do not believe the best use of the Department of Justice’s limited resources is to sue Minnesota over this.”

Athletic associations have 60 days from the executive order to take action on transgender athletes, according to the Minnesota State High School League, which has said it’s rules allowing transgender student participation currently remain in place.

The Minnesota Legislature is currently considering a bill to ban transgender athletes in school sports. The measure backed by Rep. Peggy Scott, R-Andover, has been receiving committee hearings in the House, where Republicans currently have a one-seat majority but not enough votes to pass bills.

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