Multiple Democratic officials and lawmakers said that access to state Medicaid website portals went down, which the White House confirmed later Tuesday.
“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,” said a statement from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to The Epoch Times on Tuesday, responding to questions about the Medicaid portals going down.
On social media platform X, Leavitt issued the same comment at around 3 p.m. ET.
Some Democratic lawmakers earlier Tuesday had reported that their offices received reports Medicaid was down in their respective states.
“My office has heard from Community Health Centers across Massachusetts that are unable to access their Payment Management System at HHS,” Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) wrote on X. “This is how they get paid by the federal government. That’s 2 million people in MA whose health insurance is at risk.”
The Medicaid outage reports come as President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday released a memo through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would broadly pause federal funding and grants.
The White House said in its original memo Monday on the funding freeze that the pause would not impact Social Security or Medicare payments to the elderly or “assistance provided directly to individuals,” such as some food aid and welfare programs for the poor.
Before the White House issued its statement on the Medicare outage, Leavitt was asked by reporters during her White House press conference about whether the low-income health insurance program would be impacted by the freeze. “I’ll check back on that and get back to you,” she said in response.
“Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, food stamps, welfare benefits, assistance that is going directly to individuals will not be impacted by this pause,” she also said in the press conference.
But she later added that “it is the responsibility of this president and this administration to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. That is something that President Trump campaigned on.”
It was not immediately clear when or why the Medicaid website portals went down. The initial memo Monday said that the funding pause would go into effect starting 5 p.m. on Tuesday. The Epoch Times contacted the White House for additional comment.
Specifically, the memo said that grants and loans would be put on hold while the administration ensures they are aligned with the Republican president’s priorities, including executive orders he signed ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
Tuesday’s freeze included any money intended “for foreign aid” and for “nongovernmental organizations,” among other categories, it said.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement at least 20 states, including New York, had been blocked from the payment system for Medicaid, a public health insurance program for low-income people. The White House, however, said Medicaid was exempted.
