Lawrence H. Summers
@LHSummers
Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard. Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton and Director of NEC for President Obama
Trump's Medicaid cuts represent self-harm at the national level, hurting red states and blue states alike -- but most fundamentally, hurting ordinary people including the 40% of America's kids who depend on Medicaid.
This round of budget cuts in Medicaid far exceeds any other cut the United States has made in its social safety net. The Trump law will remove more than 11 million people from the rolls, compared with about three million under the Reagan cuts. nytimes.com/2025/07/08/opi…
This round of budget cuts in Medicaid far exceeds any other cut the United States has made in its social safety net. The Trump law will remove more than 11 million people from the rolls, compared with about three million under the Reagan cuts. nytimes.com/2025/07/08/opi…
Elisa New, my wife, has a powerful @nytopinion piece making the case that we will be a lesser nation if President @realDonaldTrump gets his way with the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is right. The issues she points to are transcendent as we think about America's…
In a @NYTOpinion piece published this July 4th weekend, Poetry In America Director & Host Elisa New reflects on the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Humanities & draws attention to the crucial role of the humanities in civic life. bit.ly/46whg8X
Rahm Emanuel's @PostOpinions piece on industrial policy is the best statement of principles around government involvement in the structure of the economy that I have seen from a prominent political figure. @RahmEmanuel is on to an issue that will be more important going forward…
I talked to @LHSummers about President Trump's "big, beautiful bill," which he described as "the biggest cutback in the American social safety net ... we've ever had."
Today. 10am and 1pm on @CNN. I'll be talking w @FareedZakaria about the big questions surrounding Trumponomics and what it means for US economy.
On GPS, @ 10am & 1pm ET Sunday on @CNN … • Israel was founded in the wake of the Holocaust. So what does it mean when one of the world’s foremost Holocaust & genocide scholars—an Israeli-born academic who served in the IDF—says Israel’s war in Gaza now meets the legal…
It has to be recognized that OBBB is a big legislative accomplishment. It's a larger bill passed sooner than other presidents have achieved. But I don't think it's going to take the country in the right direction. It's going to grow our budget deficits in the future very…
Effective today, I have resigned from the Advisory Board of UATX. While I believe very much in the importance of competition and innovation in higher education, and see major problems with the lack of diverse perspective in elite institutions, I am not comfortable with the course…
I am not aware of any economist anywhere near the mainstream who is supporting anything like 1% rates in the current environment. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
The big, beautiful bill was a shocking thing in its brutality. The U.S. has never cut back its social safety net as we did here. My interview with @WalterIsaacson @AmanpourCoPBS youtube.com/shorts/lvgUAx8… via @YouTube
OBBB is a mistake for our economy. It's frankly a huge gift to China. There are very profound questions that every American should ask themselves: How long will the world's greatest debtor remain in the world's greatest power? Do we need to remain the world's greatest power in a…
Did Harvard Have It Coming? Recently, the Trump administration enacted severe actions against @Harvard based on accusations of antisemitism, but do these actions go too far? Prominent voices long affiliated with Harvard – former university president @LHSummers and law…
We are good people that stand together and protect people. What the OBBB does is cut taxes on the top tenth of a percent of the population when they pass huge sums of money to their kids and finances it by knocking millions of people off of Medicaid. This is just not the kind of…
Tomorrow. 7:20am ET. I will be on @Morning_Joe talking about tariffs and economic implications from OBBB.
RIP David Gergen. David was in equal measure wise, generous, good and loyal. In a life that has had ups and downs, David was always there for me at the low moments. David showed by how he lived there could be honor in being a Washington insider. I will miss him.
How the @realDonaldTrump Administration can think that contributions to churches who do partisan politics are fine, but those to @Harvard to do cancer research are not, is unfathomable. Harvard is far from perfect. But the idea it shouldn’t be accredited to give degrees is…
The human tragedy that @LHSummers is focusing on, rightly, is the Trump administration's plan to devastate Medicaid and remove some 11 million people from the health insurance rolls. Studies suggest the result will be tens of thousands of Americans dying prematurely. Such a…
The cruelty of the cuts in OBBB is matched only by their stupidity. Medicaid beneficiaries will lose, but so will the rest of us. The cost of care that is no longer reimbursed by Medicaid will instead be borne by hospitals and passed onto paying patients, only at higher levels,…
My daughters, who practice medicine and social work in rural New Hampshire made me realize that a focus on macroeconomics, while valid, misses the human brutality that I now see as the most problematic aspect of the OBBB legislation. This round of budget cuts in Medicaid far…