Trump White House Addresses Widespread Concerns Over Medicaid Portal Outage Following Spending Freeze
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the Medicaid website portal outage on Tuesday, which followed President Donald Trump’s order the night before to freeze federal grants.
“The White House is aware of the Medicaid website portal outage. We have confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent. We expect the portal will be back online shortly,” Leavitt posted to X.
CBS News senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs added that the “Medicaid portal issues today are unrelated to federal funding freeze, and Trump admin is looking into the outage, White House officials told CBS.”
Earlier in the day Politico reported that Trump’s “freeze on federal aid and grants is still reverberating today as the gears of government churn out the real-world impact of the administration’s broad order.” The Playbook added:
The sudden move left state and local governmental leaders parsing the language of the memo down to the very last word in order to glean exactly what it does and doesn’t apply to, WSJ’s Ken Thomas, Kristina Peterson and Patience Haggin write.
“Despite assurances that Medicaid would be unaffected by the order, WaPo’s Dan Diamond hears that people are ‘reporting problems with the Medicaid payment system.’ The online portal that distributes funds from the federally funded Head Start programs, which provide preschool assistance to hundreds of thousands of low-income children, is “warning providers of upcoming delays,” HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn reports,” added Politico rounding up some of the impacted programs.
Democrats were also quick to react with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) writing, “NEW: My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night’s federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health insurance from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.”
This is a developing story and has been updated.
