Rep. Bresnahan (PA-08) Has Faced Significant Criticism for Breaking Promises to Ban Stock Trading and Protect Medicaid

July 15, 2025

PENNSYLVANIA - Tomorrow, PA-08 Congressman Rob Bresnahan will host Vice President JD Vance for a victory lap on the Republican Tax Law that could cut Medicaid for over 20,000 and SNAP for over 10,000 residents of the district. The visit comes as Congressman Bresnahan faces significant scrutiny for not only breaking his numerous promises to protect Medicaid, as well as criticism that he may have profited from his vote by offloading Medicaid-related stock shares and may benefit from the bill’s tax breaks.

HuffPost: The GOP’s New Lie After Cutting $1 Trillion From Medicaid: We Gave It More Money!

• House Republicans who voted to pass President Donald Trump’s tax bill last week know it’s going to slash the federal Medicaid program by $1 trillion and kick millions of people off of their health care.

• But that sounds bad. And people already hate this law. So instead of saying that, Republicans are trying out a new way of talking about the bill they all voted for: just pretend they voted to increase Medicaid spending!

• “I don’t know how you can call any of this a cut when we are increasing Medicaid expenditures by $200 billion,” Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.) falsely claimed Tuesday on a conservative podcast, “The Bob Cordaro Show.”

• Later in the show, Bresnahan also falsely claimed the law will lead to “the largest deficit reduction in, I think, what will be 30 years.”

• It’s not clear what the Pennsylvania Republican is talking about regarding the $200 billion, but he is being misleading at best and lying at worst. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has clearly laid out how Trump’s tax-and-spending law will cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years.

• In the same interview, he tried to tout that the law includes a new $50 billion fund to help rural hospitals survive the bill’s devastating Medicaid cuts. But it’s just simple math that $50 billion is nowhere near enough money to offset $1 trillion ― or 20 times more ― in cuts.

Common Dreams: 'Evil and Cruel': GOP Lawmaker Shamed for Unloading Medicaid-Related Stock Before Voting to Gut Program

• Quiver Quantitative, an investment data platform that tracks stock trades made by politicians and other prominent public figures, revealed on its X account that Bresnahan recently sold shares he'd owned in Centene Corporation, a for-profit firm that specializes in delivering healthcare exchanges for Medicaid. In the weeks since he sold his shares in the company, their value plunged by more than 40 percent.

• Quiver Quantitative added that while Bresnahan claims not to manage his own stock portfolio, he does not appear to have set up a qualified blind trust that would eliminate potential conflicts of interest between his investments and his work as a member of Congress.

• Regardless, many of Bresnahan's Democratic colleagues reacted with fury and disgust to revelations that the Centene shares were dropped before he voted for a bill that will slash more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the span of a decade.

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) ripped Bresnahan for "protecting his stock portfolio while ripping away health care from 17 million Americans" with his vote to gut Medicaid.

• "This is Washington at its worst," she added. "We need to ban Congressional stock trading."

Scranton Times-Tribune: Chris Kelly Opinion: Bresnahan says ‘I don’t look at them as cuts’

• Bresnahan first drew wider scrutiny in April, when The New York Times reported that the multimillionaire MAGA Republican was among the most prolific stock traders in Congress. This was newsworthy, because Bresnahan ran on a promise to ban congressional stock trading.

• In May, he introduced legislation for such a ban, but kept on trading. One of the May transactions is news now because Bresnahan dumped Medicaid-related stock and then voted for a budget-busting bill that slashes the program and other safety nets his most vulnerable constituents rely on.

• As a candidate and a congressman, Bresnahan repeatedly vowed never to vote for any such cuts. In February, he issued this statement: “I ran for Congress under a promise of always doing what is best for the people of Northeastern Pennsylvania. If a bill is put in front of me that guts the benefits my neighbors rely on, I will not vote for it. Pennsylvania’s Eighth District chose me to advocate for them in Congress. These benefits are promises that were made to the people of NEPA and where I come from, people keep their word.”

• Bresnahan is notoriously unavailable to constituents who cite innumerable unanswered calls to his offices and rightly ridicule his “telephone townhalls,” a cowardly substitute for the real thing.

• “I never ran for Congress to enrich myself. That was never the purpose,” Bresnahan said. (He was already rich when he ran.) “I didn’t do this for a job. I’m not a state legislator that became a state rep. that ran for state Senate and then went over to Congress. I had a life before this, a very good one at that. I came here because I try to have an independent thought. I look at things uniquely and individually.”

• Of all Bresnahan’s answers, his nods to the “very good life” he enjoyed before entering politics and his “unique, individual” perspective rang the most true. Like too many of the 435 representatives and 100 senators who allegedly represent us, the 35-year-old multimillionaire has precious little in common with everyday Americans, particularly the poorest and sickest among us.

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