Alexander is chairman of one of the two Senate committees with jurisdiction over health policy. The head of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, made a similar recommendation at a hearing last week, though he said the payments should be appropriated in legislation by Congress. “We should act within our constitutional authority now to temporarily and legally fund cost-sharing reduction payments as we move away from Obamacare and toward a patient-centered system that truly works for the American people,” Brady said. Other Republicans in both chambers of Congress have echoed that sentiment, and the Senate is considering including language requiring the temporary continuation of the payments in its broader health-care bill.

Whose decision it is to make the payments—Congress’s or the administration’s—is the subject of the lawsuit House Republicans filed against the Obama administration in 2014. They argued that the administration acted illegally by making payments that, while they were called for in the Affordable Care Act, Congress had not explicitly appropriated. A federal judge ruled in the House GOP’s favor initially, but the administration can continue making the payments while the case is on appeal. Trying to buy time for the repeal effort, the Trump administration has sought to delay the litigation before it decides whether to take the Obama administration’s position on the issue or drop the appeal—which would effectively kill the payments.

Under questioning by Alexander, Price refused to make any commitments on the subsidies, saying that because he was now the defendant in the lawsuit, he shouldn’t comment. Other administration officials have said they are deciding on the payments on a month-to-month basis, but insurers face a June 21 deadline for determining whether they will stay in the Obamacare marketplaces in 2018. “I don’t know how insurance companies can operate when they don’t even know whether these payments are going to be available a week from now,” said Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Rather than guarantee the payments in the meantime, Trump has tried to use them as a cudgel to get Democrats to negotiate either on Obamacare repeal or, during last month’s spending talks, to support his other priorities in return. But they have rejected that demand, seeing the move as a blatant attempt to undermine the ACA and one that would hurt constituents in the process. “Everything is being done by this administration to sabotage the ACA so they can go out and essentially lie and say, ‘Oh see, it’s not working’ after they’ve made every effort to sabotage it,” Pallone said in a recent interview. Trump has been talking down Obamacare for months, characterizing it as “collapsing” and “dead.”