After World War II, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board. Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.
They had no luck convincing voters to abandon the government that was overseeing unprecedented prosperity until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision permitted them to turn back to an old American trope. That ruling, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, enabled opponents of the liberal consensus to resurrect the post–Civil War argument of former Confederates that a government protecting Black rights was simply redistributing wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black Americans.
That argument began to take hold, and in 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan rode it to the White House with the story of the “welfare queen,” identified as a Cadillac-driving, unemployed moocher from Chicago’s South Side (to signal that the woman was Black). “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” The woman was real, but not typical—she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient—but the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy bled individual enterprise and handed tax dollars to undeserving Black Americans.
Republicans expanded that trope to denigrate all “liberals” of both parties, who supported an active government, claiming they were all wasting government monies. Deregulation and tax cuts meant that between 1981, when Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democratic president Joe Biden did, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But rather than convincing Republican voters to return to a robust system of business regulation and restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations, that transfer of wealth seemed to make them hate the government even more, as they apparently were convinced it benefited only nonwhite Americans and women.
That hatred has led to a skewed idea of the actions and the size of the federal government. For example, Americans think the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid because they think it spends about 25% of the federal budget on such aid while they say it should only spend about 10%. In fact, it spends only about 1% on foreign aid. Similarly, while right-wing leaders insist that the government is bloated, in fact, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted last month, the U.S. population has grown by about 68% in the last 50 years while the size of the federal government’s workforce has actually shrunk.
What has happened is that federal spending has expanded by five times as the U.S. has turned both to technology and to federal contractors, who outnumber federal workers by more than two to one. Those contractors are concentrated in the Department of Defense. At the same time, budget deficits have been driven by tax cuts under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump as well as the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Treasury actually ran a surplus when Democratic president Bill Clinton was in office in the 1990s.
When asked, Americans say they don’t actually want to get rid of government programs. A late January poll from the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research—a gold-standard pollster for public attitudes—found that only about 29% of Americans wanted to see the elimination of a large number of federal jobs, with 40% opposed (29% had no opinion). Instead, 67% of adults believed the U.S. is spending too little on Social Security, 65% thought it was spending too little on education, 62% thought there is too little aid for the poor, 61% thought there is too little spending on Medicare, and 55% thought there is too little spending on Medicaid. Fifty-one percent thought the U.S. should spend more on border security.
Nonetheless, Trump is echoing forty years of Republican rhetoric when he claims to have a “mandate” to slash government and to purge it of the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that hold the playing field level for Black Americans, women, people of color, and ethnic, religious, and gender minorities.
On February 11, Trump signed an executive order putting billionaire Elon Musk in charge of “large-scale reductions in force,” and yesterday, Musk and his allies began purging the federal government of career employees, beginning with employees still in their probationary period, typically those with less than a year in the job. The Department of Veterans Affairs lost 1,000 people, the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau lost more than 100 people, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lost more than 2,400, the U.S. Forest Service lost more than 3,000, the Environmental Protection Agency lost 400, the Small Business Administration lost more than 100, and the Interior Department lost 2,300, including workers at national parks. The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to lose nearly all of its 5,200 workers in their probationary period, including 1,300 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—10% of its workforce—while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lost 1,500. “I am heartbroken, more than anything, for the future of science in this country as we gut this institution that has for so long been intentionally shielded as much as possible from politics,” an NIH employee told Will Stone, Pien Huang, and Rob Stein of NPR.
Five government employees’ unions have sued, saying the mass firings violate the formal procedures for reductions in force. Employees say they were already understaffed and there is no way they will be able to keep up the level of their performance under the cuts. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) points out that rather than saving money, “it is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars to fire employees the department just invested months into recruiting, vetting and training.”
On Reddit, federal employees shared their experience. One wrote: “The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my f*cking firing. I make $50K a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.”
It certainly appears that those in charge of the firings didn’t know what they were doing: on Thursday they fired more than 300 workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently not aware that they were the people who oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons. Today, Peter Alexander and Alexandra Marquez of NBC News reported that officials are now trying to rehire them but can’t figure out how to reach them because the workers lost access to their work email when they were fired.
The firings of federal employees come after the Trump administration instituted a “freeze” on federal spending. This impoundment of funds is illegal—the Constitution, Congress, and the courts have all established that once Congress has established a program, the president must implement it. But the truth is that Congress implemented these programs for a reason, and members would not kill them because they recognize they are important for all Americans.
Now MAGA voters are now discovering that much of what billionaire Elon Musk is cutting as “waste, fraud, and corruption” is programs that benefit them, often more than they benefit Democratic-dominated states. Dramatically, farmers, who backed Trump by a margin of three to one, are badly hit by the freeze on funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act for conservation of land, soil, and water. “This isn’t just hippie-dippy stuff,” Wisconsin cattle, pig, and poultry farmer Aaron Pape told Linda Qiu and Julie Creswell of the New York Times. “This is affecting mainstream farmers.”
Similarly, the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a blow to the agricultural sector: USAID buys about $2 billion in agricultural products from U.S. farmers every year. It has also supported funding for research at state universities like the University of Tennessee, the University of Missouri, and the University of Louisiana.
Cuts to indirect spending in grants from the National Institutes of Health will also hit hard across the country, and states where Trump won more than 55% of the 2024 vote are no exception. Former college president Michael Nietzel noted in Forbes that Texas stands to lose more than $300 million; Ohio, more than $170 million; and Tennessee, Missouri, and Florida, more than $130 million apiece. These losses will cause thousands of layoffs and, as the Association of American Medical Colleges said, “diminish the nation’s research capacity, slow scientific progress and deprive patients, families and communities across the country of new treatments, diagnostics and preventive interventions.”
Trump said Wednesday he wanted to shutter the Department of Education immediately, calling it “a big con job.” That Department provides grants for schools in low-income communities as well as money for educating students with special needs: eight of the ten states receiving the most federal money for their K–12 schools are dominated by Republicans.
Trump has called the Federal Emergency Management Agency a “disaster” and said states should handle natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and tornadoes on their own. But states do not have the resilience they need for such short-term emergencies. Once again, while all states receive FEMA money, Republican-dominated states get slightly more of that money than Democratic-dominated states do.
Before the 2024 election, Aaron Zitner, Jon Kamp, and Brian McGill of the Wall Street Journal noted that by 2022, 53% of the counties in the U.S. received at least a quarter of their income from government programs—primarily through Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those counties heavily support Republicans, including Trump.
On Friday the Republican-dominated House Budget Committee presented its budget proposal to the House. It calls for adding $4.5 trillion to the budget deficit in order to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. It also calls for $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, including cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and supplemental nutrition programs. Budget Committee chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) said: “The era of wasteful, woke, and weaponized government is over.”
For forty years, Republican politicians could win elections by insisting that government spending redistributed wealth from hardworking taxpayers to the undeserving because they did not entirely purge the federal programs that their own voters liked. Now Trump, Musk, and the Republicans are purging funds for cancer research, family farms, national parks, food, nuclear security, and medical care—all programs his supporters care about—and threatening to throw the country into an economic tailspin that will badly hurt Republican-dominated states.
A January AP/NORC poll found that only 12% of U.S. adults thought it would be good for billionaires to advise presidents, while 60% thought it would be bad.
Forty years of ideology is under pressure now from reality, and the outcome remains uncertain.
