Lisa McClain Lies Healthcare Michigan

Lisa McClain's Advice to Politicians: 'Just Tell the Truth.' Here's Her Own Record.

The fourth-ranking House Republican told POLITICO the secret to her job is honesty. In the same interview she repeated a false claim about Social Security — and a month later she told a Michigan mother there were no cuts to Medicaid, then voted for the bill that cut it.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 04, 2026

In February 2025, a POLITICO reporter asked Michigan Rep. Lisa McClain whether her new job in House Republican leadership meant she had to be more careful about what she said in public.

McClain didn't hesitate.

"That will never be me. I'm just not good at that. I think if you're honest, truthful, genuine, transparent, if you just are who you are, no, I don't think you need to be guarded. Just tell the truth."

It's good advice. She should try it.

McClain is the House Republican Conference Chair — the fourth-ranking Republican in the House and the person whose actual job is to decide what her party says and how it says it. When she gets a fact wrong, it doesn't stay a personal mistake. It becomes the message. And the record shows she gets a lot of facts wrong.

The 150-year-olds who were never collecting anything

In that very same POLITICO interview, McClain defended the DOGE hunt through federal benefit programs with a line she clearly thought was a slam dunk:

"If you're 150 years old collecting Social Security, there might be a problem on that. What's the matter with going in and doing an audit of these programs?"

Nobody was 150 years old collecting Social Security. Not one person.

The claim came from a spreadsheet Elon Musk posted showing how many people appear in each age bracket in Social Security's records — including more than 1.3 million entries in the 150-to-159 range. Musk joked about vampires. Trump talked about taking "millions of people" off the rolls.

But being in a database is not the same as getting a check. As Marketplace reported at the time, Social Security's own data showed only about 89,000 people over the age of 99 receiving payments based on their earnings — and the agency has a code in place specifically to stop payments to anyone listed as older than 115. The reason so many ancient birthdates show up at all is that Social Security runs on COBOL, a 65-year-old programming language. When a birthdate is missing or incomplete, the software falls back on a default reference date: May 20, 1875. Someone "born" in 1875 turns 150 in 2025. That's it. That's the vampire.

The Social Security Administration said the same thing publicly: the numbers in the news represented people with no date of death recorded, not people cashing checks.

McClain wasn't the one who made the spreadsheet. But she's the person paid to decide what House Republicans say — and what she chose to say was the version that wasn't true. She used it to justify going through the retirement program seniors spent their whole working lives paying into.

In the same conversation, asked what happens if DOGE cuts start killing grants for Head Start or programs for disabled kids, her answer was: "Let's not fear monger until we get there."

"There are no cuts to Medicaid"

A month later, we got there.

In March 2025, Michigan Republicans were getting hammered on telephone town halls by constituents terrified about Social Security and Medicaid. On McClain's call, the Associated Press reported, a woman named Beverly said her handicapped son relies on Medicaid and told her congresswoman, "I'm really concerned about that being cut, I guess."

Here is what the fourth-ranking House Republican told that mother:

"Let me put your mind at ease. Do not listen to the Democrats that are fearmongering. There are no cuts to Medicaid."

On July 3, 2025, McClain voted for H.R. 1 — Trump's budget bill — which passed the House 218 to 214. The bill cut Medicaid.

Not "reformed." Not "found waste in." Cut. Here in Michigan, an estimated 200,000 Michiganders are projected to lose Medicaid coverage because of that bill, and the state faces a roughly $2 billion hole in its budget as federal Medicaid money dries up. Seventy percent of Michigan's Medicaid spending comes from the federal government.

Four months separate "there are no cuts to Medicaid" from the vote that cut it. Beverly's son is somewhere in those numbers, and so are a lot of other people's kids.

It's worth noticing what else McClain was doing during that stretch. The AP reported that Republican leaders were warning members away from in-person town halls, "contending without offering evidence that paid activists were disrupting events" — and named McClain as claiming Democratic donors had "organized" the disruptions. So the people asking whether their health care was about to be cut were fake, and the cuts they were asking about weren't real. Both of those turned out to be backwards.

Osama bin Laden, and a 52-year low she called a 40-year high

This is not new behavior. It's the same thing she was doing before she was ever in leadership.

At a Trump rally in Macomb County in April 2022, McClain gave a speech that ran under six minutes. CNN's fact-checkers debunked four claims in it.

Listing what she called Trump's accomplishments, she said he had "Caught Osama bin Laden and Soleimani, al-Baghdadi." Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in 2011, in a raid ordered by President Obama. Trump took office in 2017.
She said unemployment was at a "40-year high." The March 2022 rate was 3.6% — near a 52-year low, and a tick above the best number of the Trump years.
She said that under Trump, "I don't believe we had any wars." American ground troops fought in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq during his term. A Navy SEAL was killed in a raid in Yemen in 2017.
Gesturing at the crowd, she said: "Tell me Joe Biden won? He couldn't have this many people at a rally, the State of the Union combined." Biden won.

When CNN asked her office about all this, it didn't respond. On the Monday after the rally, McClain posted that Joe Biden "misspeaks every single day and the media pays no attention to it," and asked, "Isn't it ironic how I'm under attack for an honest mistake." She never said which of the four claims was the mistake — and one honest mistake wouldn't cover the other three.

That last one wasn't a slip of the tongue anyway. McClain voted on January 6 and January 7, 2021 against certifying Biden's wins in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Asked on a Michigan TV program in January 2022 whether she had any doubts that Biden won her own state — he carried Michigan by more than 154,000 votes — she said, "Well, I think there's a lot of doubts."

The messenger problem

Every politician spins. This is different in two ways.

First, it's her job. The Conference Chair is the House GOP's message shop. When McClain repeats something false about Social Security, it doesn't stop with her — it gets handed to the rest of the House Republican conference as a talking point.

Second, it's aimed at the people who trusted her. Beverly wasn't at a rally. She called her own congresswoman, on a call her congresswoman's office controlled, and asked a scared question about her disabled son. She got reassurance instead of information, and four months later she got the cut.

McClain says the way to do this job is to be "honest, truthful, genuine, transparent." We agree. That's exactly the standard we're holding her to — and by her own standard, she's failing it.

We deserve a representative who tells us the truth, even when the truth is bad news. We deserve better.