Politics
Illinois, Other States Temporarily Lost Access to Medicaid Portal Amid Funding Freeze
Video: The WTTW News Spotlight Politics team on the federal funding freeze and more of the day’s top stories. (Produced by Paul Caine)
Federal funding will temporarily keep flowing due to a court order, but confusion bordering on panic remains over a directive from President Donald Trump’s budget office that seeks to suddenly halt a wide spectrum of federal grants.
“The intent here is to disrupt,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday. “The intention here is to make cuts. And it will affect people all across our state.”
Pritzker, a Democrat, said that Trump gave no warning about the immediate stop to sending aid, and indicated that Illinois was working off a memo issued by Trump’s budget office that was published online — including by various national media outlets — on Monday night.
The memo calls for pausing federal grants while agencies examine whether the spending is in keeping with the president’s priorities, such as rooting out diversity initiatives and support for renewable energy.
By Tuesday morning, Pritzker’s office said it was unable to access the portal used to process claims for Medicaid, the government health care program for low-income people and families. Medicaid is jointly administered by the federal and state government, which also share costs.
Pritzker said by late afternoon access had been restored.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a post on the social media platform X that the administration was aware of the outage, and hinted that it was a technical problem.
“We have confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent,” she wrote in the post.
But during a news conference, Pritzker said the timing couldn’t be just coincidence.
“Don’t let them fool you that there was some kind of website outage,” Pritzker said, adding that Trump officials were either lying or incompetent.
“What Donald Trump tried to do in the last 24 hours is illegal,” Pritzker said. “This is a demonstration of cruelty against people who depend on us. Working families who rely on federal assistance to pay their rent, people who need help paying their utility bills, parents who need critical programs like Head Start for quality, affordable child care and 3.5 million Illinoisans who get their health insurance through Medicaid.”
The White House said media outlets and critics describing the attempt to “pause radical, wasteful government spending” were part of a “fake news hoax” given that Medicaid is among the assistance programs “explicitly excluded.”
But Pritzker and other Democratic officials said that suddenly stopping spending on programs like university research, infrastructure, early childhood, utility assistance for low-income families and many others would be “devastating.”
A judge granting temporary reprieve was welcomed, Pritzker said, but it’s not true assurance given that there’s no telling when the order will be lifted, making it impossible for grantees like university researchers to make plans.
According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, states received a record $1 trillion in grants in the 2022 fiscal year, making up more than 36% of states’ revenue.
“Federal grant funding helps states pay for public services, such as health care, education, transportation and infrastructure,” said Pew manager Rebecca Theiss. “States are currently facing tighter budgets than in recent years due to the expiration of federal pandemic aid and stagnating tax collections, among other challenges.”
Pritzker said he will “protect” Illinois, but at the same time indicated that options for states are limited.
“We cannot make up for billions of dollars of Medicaid that might be taken away from the state of Illinois,” Pritzker said. “We cannot make up for hundreds of millions of dollars that might go to universities or might be taken away from our state universities.”
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul on Tuesday announced he is joining with other attorneys general in asking the courts to immediately block Trump’s sudden pause of federal funding.
Read More:
- Illinois Joins Other States in Asking Courts to Block Donald Trump’s Federal Funding Pause
- CTA Says Federal Funding for Red Line Extension Still Expected Despite Freeze
Note: This story was updated at 7:25 p.m. with new information.
Contact Amanda Vinicky: @AmandaVinicky | [email protected]