Prep Work Begins To Take From The Poor, Give To The Rich

As the Trump II administration has taken shape over the past two weeks — in the form of haphazard nominations via Truth Social posts — and as policy proposals once cloaked in the shadows of Project 2025 make their way into the sunlight, we’re starting to get a picture of which vulnerable segments of the population will suffer first.

Immigrants will, unsurprisingly, be an early target of a second Trump administration and their congressional allies. Lower-income people, we’re learning, will be as well.

Republicans have done a lot of singing and a lot of dancing over the years about how much they don’t want to make cuts to two particular federal programs, Medicare and Social Security (even though they very much do, so long as the cut is camouflaged in other terminology). President Biden famously confronted the party’s blatant hypocrisy on the issue directly during his State of the Union address in 2023, when he forced Republican members of Congress to commit, on live TV, to not cutting Medicare and Social Security, even though there is a new push to shrink both programs every few years.

The theatrics of that moment were a satisfying if short-lived victory for the Biden White House and Democrats — pinning Republicans down publicly on protecting the very popular entitlement programs that they quietly try to go after every time they have the opportunity.

Republicans are less rhetorically creative about their disdain for other federal social safety net programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. Cuts to these programs are often disguised as attempts at “streamlining” or supposedly common sense reforms pushed by conservative policy shops, like work requirements for enrollees. While Trump himself publicly campaigned in 2016 on a promise to protect Medicaid, his administration also cleared the way for 13 Republican-controlled states to add work requirements to their programs — a move that set off a firestorm of legal challenges and ended up being only temporarily successful in one state. Per WaPo: “The requirements only took full effect in one state, Arkansas, for a five-month period when about 18,000 people were dropped from the program.”

It appears that this disingenuous approach to “protecting” Medicaid will continue in Trump II. As part of their brainstorming on how to offset the massive costs of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, congressional Republicans and economic advisers close to Trump are considering making changes to Medicaid, as well as other federal safety net programs, like SNAP — in the form of work requirements and spending caps.

But they’re reportedly worried (as they should be) about how it’ll look to gut social safety net programs in order to extend tax cuts that lowered taxes for the majority of Americans, but primarily benefited those making $400,000 or more a year.

Per WaPo:

Among the options under discussion by GOP lawmakers and aides are new work requirements and spending caps for the programs, according to seven people familiar with the talks, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Those conversations have included some economic officials on Trump’s transition team, the people said.

However, concern is high among some Republicans about the political downsides of such cuts, which would affect programs that provide support for at least 70 million low-income Americans, and some people familiar with the talks stressed that discussions are preliminary.

…

House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told reporters Wednesday that a “responsible and reasonable work requirement” for Medicaid benefits resembling the one that already exists for food stamps could yield about $100 billion in savings. He also said another $160 billion in reduced costs could come from checking Medicaid eligibility more than once per year.

“I feel like there are some common sense, reasonable things, that almost 90 percent of the American people would say, ‘That’s got to change,’” Arrington said.