Briefing: New Medicaid timeline + more
This week, we’re introducing our new Medicaid timeline, which traces the administration’s sustained assault on the program and the millions of people who rely on it. We have quick updates from our Immigration, Federal Workforce, and Medical Research Funding teams.
We also started rolling out topic filtering for timeline events; this is fussy and nerdy, but we have found it genuinely helpful for understanding what is actually happening around a given issue, under the flood-tide of news. In the Immigration timeline, you can now filter and view (and link to!) all events related to birthright citizenship, mass detention, lawsuits, or the administration’s campaign of targeting protesters and observers — or any of our many other tagged topics. Thank you to our website crew for making this possible! We’ll be bringing this option to our other timelines through the spring.
Introducing the Medicaid timeline
Medicaid is a sprawling, complex government program, and the process of undermining it via executive power has matched that complexity. This week, our Medicaid team launched a timeline that tracks the administration’s lines of attack and their effects.
Jointly funded by the federal government and the states, Medicaid provides free or low-cost health insurance for low-income adults and children, the elderly, and disabled people. Medicaid spending — $919 billion in combined state and federal spending in 2024 — is a significant part of the economy in communities nationwide.
Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, the administration laid off hundreds of Medicaid employees, shuttered offices, and rescinded a longstanding transparency rule. But the biggest assault on Medicaid was the 2025 budget. Immediately following Trump’s February 2025 promise that Medicaid wouldn’t be touched, the House of Representatives approved a budget resolution that mandated cuts so deep they required massive reductions to Medicaid spending.
The final “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), signed by Trump on July 4, 2025, decreases federal funding for health insurance programs by $1.02 trillion over 10 years. The single largest reduction comes from requiring millions of Medicaid recipients to repeatedly file paperwork proving they are either working or seeking work. A smaller but still significant limitation bars Medicaid from reimbursing many Planned Parenthood clinics, even for nonabortion healthcare.
The expected effects are stark: By 2034, more than 10 million people are likely to lose health insurance because of the budget bill. Health policy scholars project almost 95,000 preventable hospitalizations and more than 1 million missed cancer screenings over the next decade resulting from the cuts. And although the budget sparked protests at a congressional committee hearing and ongoing litigation over the Planned Parenthood provision, the cuts remain in force.
Medicaid-related action now largely moves to the states, which must implement work-reporting requirements by the end of 2026. And Trump’s latest line of attack uses Medicaid as a weapon against political opponents: In late February, the administration announced it would withhold $259 million in funding to Minnesota because of its handling of alleged Medicaid fraud, which Governor Tim Walz argues is retaliation against the Democratic-led state. (The administration is also threatening to withhold Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements to force hospitals to stop offering healthcare it doesn’t like — as covered in our Transgender Healthcare timeline.)
Immigration
The Immigration team added 28 entries to our timeline — and added topic tags to all 477 entries to date. In Chicago, ICE deported hundreds of people a federal court had ruled eligible for release on bond. Meanwhile, reporting from DHS’s largest detention center (outside El Paso, TX) revealed both systemic cruelty and individual depravity. We tracked three more deaths in detention and an update on the first US citizen ICE killed under the second Trump administration — a Texas man whose death in March of 2025 was not publicly disclosed Federal judges ruled against the administration in two ongoing lawsuits, and the Illinois Accountability Commission heard expert testimony on the effects of last fall’s violent federal operations in Chicago.
Federal Workforce
The Federal Workforce team added 11 new items to our timeline. We saw fallout from last year’s drastic job cuts, including the IRS assigning employees with no direct tax experience to help process tax returns, urgent staffing shortages at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and a ruling that Kristi Noem and other top DHS officials can be compelled to speak on the record about staffing cuts at FEMA. We also included the latest developments in a lawsuit over collective bargaining rights.
Medical Research Funding
The Medical Research Funding team added 3 new entries to our timeline. Despite Congress rejecting Trump’s proposed budget cuts, the administration continues to interfere with science. We’re seeing a 90% reduction in grant application calls compared to last year and major delays in release for already awarded funding. The administration also announced that it will no longer recognize a union formed by researchers working at the NIH.
How to help
Unbreaking is run in the spirit of a mutual aid cooperative, with researchers, writers, editors, and community organizers working collaboratively to create and maintain our timelines and explainers. We welcome both experts in government as well as curious and interested observers. You can learn more about our work, make a contribution, or apply to join us.
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