House Speaker Paul Ryan said he decided to retire in part because he was able to accomplish many of his top goals, including a massive overhaul of the tax code.
But Ryan admitted to The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes on Monday that he’ll leave Congress next year without having reformed the nation’s entitlement programs, which he has been working to do since arriving in Congress in 1999.
“The one thing that got away from us, which is my signature issue, is entitlement reform,” Ryan, R Wis., told Hayes at the Midwest Conservative Summit, sponsored by The Weekly Standard and held in Wisconsin.
Ryan has long proposed curbing the growth of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but he’ll leave Congress after his term ends, leaving the goal unfinished. The nation’s entitlement programs have not been reduced in any significant way despite the GOP governing both Congress and the White House since 2017.
Ryan said the reforms, which have passed in GOP-authored budgets over the years, have never cleared the Senate and faced opposition by former President Barack Obama.
President Trump has also resisted entitlement reform, and excluded it from the administration’s budget proposals.
“I do believe we have built a foundation for entitlement reform among grassroots Republicans, and House Republicans,” Ryan said. “That foundation, I would have hoped would have realized success by now.”
The 2018 House GOP budget, which never became law, would have cut $200 billion in mandatory spending.
Ryan said the House-passed healthcare reform bill would also have reformed the growth of Medicaid and replaced Obamacare, which is a new entitlement program. But the bill failed to make it through the Senate, blocked in part by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who voted against it.
“I’m really encouraged we did our job and passed it in the House and it is discouraging that that bill failed by basically a vote in the Senate,” Ryan said. “Had that bill gotten done, we would have done it all, more or less.”
Ryan said he talks to Trump often about why entitlement reform is necessary. He believes the president will try to tackle entitlement reform, even though Trump has mostly rejected the idea because “he knows the math.”
