Earlier this week, I had a column about some fun ways the outgoing Trump administration tried to hamstring Biden on its way out the door.
Nicholas Bagley points out another in The Atlantic, regarding waivers that allowed states to impose work requirements in Medicaid — waivers the Supreme Court is in the process of reviewing, because some lower courts struck them down:
On January 4 . . . in a seemingly innocuous letter to state Medicaid directors, the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, offered “additional details of the process” for withdrawing waivers. One of those new details is that no withdrawal can take effect for at least nine months.
The change is a brazen, cynical attempt to protect work requirements long enough for the Supreme Court to rule on [and potentially revive] them. And while it’s dastardly, it’s also clever. When the states agree to the terms of Verma’s letter — and Republican-controlled states certainly will, if they haven’t already — its terms arguably become enforceable as a kind of intergovernmental contract. I say “arguably” because the letter itself may be legally defective, as two Democratic congressional leaders have already argued in an angry missive to Verma. But the possibility that the courts might treat it as binding means that it’d be risky for the Biden team to withdraw the waivers before nine months are up.