Mulvaney offers Democrats $1 for Obamacare funds for every $1 for wall funds

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

So it is up to the White House whether or how much to spend on CSR payments?  Congress has not appropriated a specific amount for this?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

So it is up to the White House whether or how much to spend on CSR payments?  Congress has not appropriated a specific amount for this?

Congress hasn't, but they can choose to do so at anytime.

?

If Congress has not appropriated an amount, then either Trump can't offer to spend it, or else they have given the administration a blank check.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

?

If Congress has not appropriated an amount, then either Trump can't offer to spend it, or else they have given the administration a blank check.

The Obama administration had argued that due to the way PPACA was written, they didn't need a separate appropriation for those funds, and continued to fund it as such. The House sued them, and the lawsuit hasn't fully concluded, and I believe Republicans either scuttled it or attempted to scuttle it because they didn't want the exchanges to implode due to their own lawsuit, on their watch, because they know they would get blamed for it. They wanted the exchanges to collapse under Obama's watch. The lawsuit actually succeeded but the ruling was suspended pending appeal.

So Trump is merely working with the same logic Obama was using, and Republicans are indifferent for obvious reasons.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/us/politics/affordable-care-act-trump-subsidies.html

Yeah, that seems pretty clearly illegal.  If Congress had any sense at all they would go ahead and just appropriate money for it while they figured out the other stuff.  Doesn't look like the Republicans attempted to scuttle the lawsuit against cost-sharing subsidies though - what happened was the elimination of them was part of the Ryan healthcare bill that got drowneded.