State leaders tell Trump cabinet members that Utah should run its own federal programs

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Utah’s Speaker of the House Mike Schultz is among the top state leaders pushing for Utah to have control over federal programs.

“(We want to be a) national experiment allowing us to keep… some of its federal dollars and tax dollars and run some programs — run the programs,” the Speaker told President Trump’s Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin when they visited Utah Monday. “We want to be a pilot project and help discontinue the federal oversight.”

“Sign us up,” he said emphatically during a press conference.

“Whether it’s education, transportation, Medicaid, public health, public lands, we manage more effectively or more efficiently and more affordably than the federal government, certainly, but more so than any other state in the nation,” Schultz said.

Is it feasible?

Schultz met with ABC4.com for an interview with Inside Utah Politics host Lindsay Aerts Tuesday, where he was asked to elaborate on that plan. The full interview is set to air Sunday, April 13.

Specifically, he was asked about how the state would pay for a program like Medicaid since 27% of Utah’s $30.8 billion dollar budget comes from the federal government, and they pay for at least 50% of the state’s Medicaid costs.

“What we’re saying here is block grant that money to the states and even maybe do it with less, if that’s what you’re trying to do — cut the dollar amounts because we can do more with less here at the state level and if we have the federal bureaucracies out of the way that create all the hoops that you have to jump through,” Schultz said.

A block grant is a federal assistance grant with more broadly defined functions than other grants, allowing more flexibility for things like community development of social services. But, there’s also the possibility of less oversight with a block grant.

“If you block grant the money to Medicaid, let state figure out the solutions,” Shultz said.

He gave an example of what he says Utah has done this with transportation.

“Utah led the nation with doing our own NEPA studies inside of transportation. We followed the fame federal rules, the same federal guidelines (and) we do it in a quarter of the amont of time it takes the federal government to do it,” Schultz said.

NEPA is the acronym for a 1970s law called the National Environmental Policy Act. It requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts a state’s proposed project before making decisions, ensuring environmental considerations are part of the decision-making process.

“We would like to get some federal funds to come in and help us pay for the double-tracking FrontRunner, absolutely,” Schultz said. “We as a state already set aside over $500 million to do that on our part, but again, we need to recognize that the majority of the money that we get from the federal government for transportation is the money that we already sent back to the federal government.”

Schultz argues that Utah gets about as much money as it sends to the federal government and he believes the state can spend it more efficiently.

The block grants are the same solution Governor Spencer Cox proposed as Trump made the decision to disband the Department of Education (DOE).

“We can do two things — we can get more money to the states and save the federal government money, which we need to do,” Cox has said. “Just by eliminating (the DOE) and block granting those funds to the states. I can tell you that’s very popular on the right and the left among the governors in this country.”

Specifics of which programs could be run at the state level are scarce at this point, and realistically could look different for Medicaid versus public lands issues, and transportation, education, or eviornmental issues, but Secretary Kennedy seemed enthused by the idea.

“President Trump’s vision for this country is that the states should be 50 laboratories around the country, that they should be able to run their own affairs and the best ideas are coming from the grassroots, are coming from the bottom up,” Kennedy said. “We are determined to do that, and we’re talking about doing it already, and we’re going to move very quickly.”