Medicaid portals reportedly down after Trump’s federal funding freeze

Medicaid payment portals are down following the Trump administration’s decision to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding, an effort by the new president to root out “wokeness” in the federal government, multiple sources have reported.

A health insurance program for lower-income individuals, Medicaid is run jointly by the states and the federal government. With the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip), Medicaid insures more than one in five Americans, or about 79 million people, nearly half of whom are children. Medicaid also pays for roughly two in every five births in the US.

“My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night’s federal funding freeze,” Ron Wyden, a US Democratic senator from Oregon, said in a now-viral social media post Tuesday.

“This is a blatant attempt to rip away health care from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.”

Later on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on social media that the administration was “aware of the Medicaid website portal outage” and that the portal was expected to “be back online shortly”. Leavitt said payments to providers continue to be made, but did not provide a reason for the outage.

During his campaign, Trump promised to protect Medicare and social security, federal programs that provide health insurance and retirement benefits for seniors, but conspicuously left out Medicaid. In his last term, Trump attempted to slash the program, with more attempts to cut government programs promised in this term.

The inability of doctors and hospitals to access Medicaid payment portals came before a larger freeze on grant funding enacted by the Trump administration, and appears to have affected numerous programs run through the massive $18tn budget of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

HHS controls a vast array of programs, from the nation’s biomedical research agencies to Head Start, which pays for childcare for lower-income children. Head Start program administrators have also reported payment system outages. Last week, scientific agencies within HHS paused public communications and scientific meetings legally required to distribute research grants.

“Any pause in federal funding of Medicaid – the largest source of federal funding received by states – would be disastrous,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families.

“That such a memo could have been drafted without clarifying this question is negligent and suggests a callous indifference to the tens of millions of Americans who are covered by Medicaid,” Alker added.

Trump’s nominee to head HHS, vaccine critic and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy, is slated for a confirmation hearing before the US Senate on Wednesday.