Entitlements and Medicaid could be on the chopping block by slashing eligibility with work requirements, as the White House sets its sights on funding cuts that go beyond discretionary spending and into mandatory outlays that have historically been unpopular to touch.

Mandatory spending cost $3.8 trillion of the $6.1 trillion in total outlays for fiscal year 2023, with more than half for Social Security and Medicare that Trump and Republicans say are largely off limits. That leaves programs like Medicaid, which provides health insurance to more than 70 million low-income Americans, and entitlements benefits like food stamps and unemployment insurance that could be singled out.

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Discretionary spending for defense and nondefense items like funding the various government agencies made up just $1.7 trillion and is subject to the annual appropriations process.

“Social Security benefits are a sacred cow. Medicare is probably the No. 2 scared cow. I think there’s only two scared cows,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) said. “I think Medicaid is subject to some possible adjustments.”

The brewing war over welfare among Republicans is part of a bigger discussion on how to slash federal spending to achieve Trump’s desired outcomes on items like permanently extending the 2017 tax cuts and beefing up southern border security. Work requirements are likely to be a major component for making cuts to Medicaid and other low-income assistance programs including food stamps under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

“If you put work requirements on a bunch of these welfare programs, including SNAP and the nutrition programs, you’d have people contributing to the workforce — God knows there’s plenty of demand for workers — rather than just collecting,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said.

Trump has vowed to “love and cherish” Medicaid, but there’s an appetite among Republicans to make it harder to qualify to reduce the program’s cost which topped $616 billion in fiscal year 2023. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have emphasized that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are largely off the table except for fraud and abuse.

“We’re not going to do anything with that, unless we can find some abuse or waste,” Trump recently said of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “The people won’t be affected. It will only be more effective and better.”

Trump reiterated Friday that he was “not going to touch [Social Security] other than to make it stronger.” He claimed, without offering details, that there are “people that shouldn’t be on, and those people we have to weed out. Most of them, or many of them so far, have been illegal immigrants.” Those in the U.S. illegally do not qualify for Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, save for some exceptions for emergency Medicaid.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sought to capitalize on the diverging views in the GOP over how to handle costly measures like tax cuts and Medicaid.

“They have been kind of busy fighting amongst themselves around how big the tax cuts will be for their billionaire buddies and how much they are going to cut out of Medicaid as part of their scheme to end it,” Jeffries told reporters. “I get it; Republicans have been busy. There’s an ongoing internal GOP civil war.”

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) ignored the pleas of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to let the House take the lead on passing Trump’s agenda by releasing the text of a budget resolution Friday that would provide hundreds of billions in money for defense and border security. The measure is the first in a two-step process to passing two major bills through budget reconciliation that bypasses the filibuster and only needs a simple majority.

As part of their diverging plan, the House wants to pass just one such bill that includes tax reform but has struggled to find agreement on spending cuts. The Freedom Caucus has been negotiating up to $2.5 trillion in offsets.

Another potential arena for cuts under mandatory spending could be student loans, which along with Social Security and Medicare have been the largest increase in mandatory spending over the past 20 years.

“When we break them out, there are several $100 billion in other types of mandatories [besides Social Security and Medicare],” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Student loans is a part of that, and most certainly, there’s a better way to do the student loan program than the way that it’s being done now.”

David Sivak contributed to this report.