On the eve of what is expected to be a razor-thin vote on the G.O.P.’s deeply unpopular health-care bill in the House, and battling a slumping approval rating nationally, Donald Trump is beginning to face opposition from an unexpected quarter: governors in red states who are quietly panicking that the president’s policies will cut critical lifelines to the very constituents who voted him into power.

Few Republican governors are looking to pick a fight with Trump. But many have balked at the extent of the cuts in the president’s Obamacare replacement bill and his draconian budget proposal. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the House G.O.P. bill would result in 24 million people losing their health-insurance coverage over the next decade, and that low-income and elderly individuals living in rural areas—many of which are Republican strongholds—would experience a disproportionate spike in health-care costs. The White House’s budget proposal, unveiled just days later, would compound those economic impacts by gutting social services, including a number of little-known job-training and economic programs that provide vital services to these very constituents. “It just seems like you’re going after places that are so pivotal to what you are arguing you wanted to do for your base,” Kim Rueben, a budget expert at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, told The New York Times of Trump’s proposals. “They’re cutting all sorts of infrastructure projects and economic development projects at the same time that the president is still talking about how much of an investment he’s going to put into infrastructure.”

While federal agencies including the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency face the steepest cutbacks under the White House’s “hard-power” budget, Republican governors have quietly expressed unease at the depth of cuts to key programs serving many southern and midwestern states. They include the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Delta Regional Authority, the Community Block Grant Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program—some of which are on the chopping block in their entirety. In a statement, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley argued that the domestic programs are “important resources that provide funding that benefits rural projects such as infrastructure improvement, job creation, technology upgrades and school programs,” adding, “I look forward to sharing with Washington how vital these assets are to our poorest and smallest communities.” A spokesperson for Asa Hutchinson told the Times that the Arkansas governor “wants to make sure the Delta is not cut off from necessary economic development funding,” which he said was a “relied upon program.”

The White House budget proposal comes at a time when governors from both sides of the aisle are also grappling with the impending reality of extensive cuts to Medicaid, which is widely popular even in states Trump won. A number of Republican governors who expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act—including John Kasich of Ohio and Brian Sandoval of Nevada—have publicly derided the House plan, which they argue will be detrimental to vulnerable Americans and hurt states fiscally. The proposed cuts in the Trump budget have not diminished governors’ fears, nor has the Trump administration worked to address their concerns. Citing four people who were on a conference call between a bipartisan group of governors and White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, the Times reports that Mulvaney defended the cuts as necessary to offset the $54 billion increase in military funding. “It was, ‘We’ll get back to you on that,’” Pat Pitney, the budget director for Governor Bill Walker of Alaska, said.

Republican governors are not alone in their fight. “There are going to be a lot of these things that don’t fall on party lines, because it’s so impactful to the communities that the Congress and the Senate represent,” Pitney said. “I think there are some that are dead on arrival, but not every one is dead on arrival.” And the proposal has already seen significant pushback from Congress, which ultimately controls the purse strings. Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have all publicly criticized a number of the cuts in Trump’s budget—particularly the billions of dollars he would claw back from the State Department. And while it is standard for a president’s budget to be altered before it is enacted, and Trump’s proposal serves more as more as a wish-list than a true blueprint, Republicans worry that some of the called-for cuts will ultimately come to pass, potentially costing the G.O.P. at the ballot box. “If any of these proposals ever become law or even draft legislation,” Amelia Chassé, a spokeswoman for Republican Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, said to the Times, “we will take a serious look at how to address them during our own budget process.”