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      ‘Pro-worker priorities’? Trump’s budget offers the exact opposite | Steven Greenhouse

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      With Donald Trump pushing hard to give big tax cuts to the rich and do huge favors for crypto billionaires, it was jarring to see a photo of a Trump aide carrying a sign that said: “President Trump’s Pro-Worker Priorities”. The aide was about to place the sign on Trump’s lectern; it mentioned such “pro-worker priorities” as ending federal taxes on tips and overtime pay: catchy, but scattershot policies that will help only a fraction of the nation’s workers.Not surprisingly, that sign made no mention of Trump’s many anti-worker policies that will do serious harm to millions of workers and their families. Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which is advancing in the House, includes the biggest cuts ever to Medicaid, a nearly 30% reduction in food assistance, and a $350bn cut in aid that helps working-class kids afford college. Trump has also pushed to end home-heating assistance and to make it harder for millions of Americans to afford Obamacare. If that isn’t painful enough, GOP deficit hawks have vowed to torpedo the budget bill unless it includes even more cuts. Under the current Trump House bill, at least 13.7 million people would lose health coverage – and the deficit hawks’ demands would increase that number.Even some prominent Republicans acknowledge that the Republican bill contains policies that will screw workers. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, slammed the Trump-GOP push to chop hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid. “These are working people and their children who need healthcare, and it’s just wrong to go and cut their healthcare when they’re trying to make ends meet, trying to help their kids,” Hawley said. He added: “No Republican should be supporting Medicaid benefit cuts.”To give a truer picture of what Trump is all about, that Trump aide should have also been carrying a sign that said: “President Trump’s Pro-Billionaire Priorities”. Those priorities are more ambitious and will cost far more than Trump’s “pro-worker priorities” – they include over a trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy, stratagems to help crypto billionaires grow ever richer, and big cuts to the IRS budget to reduce the chances that the ultra-wealthy will get audited. To please his billionaire finance buddies, Trump has sought to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created to protect typical families from financial scams and extortionate banking practices. And let’s not forget the many ways Trump is helping to steer more business to Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s biggest campaign contributor (to the tune of $270m backing the president and other Republicans).The Center for American Progress points out that the Trump/Republican budget bill would, if implemented, “be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in US history”. Another progressive thinktank, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes that the budget bill would cut $1.1tn from food aid, Medicaid and other health programs while lavishing $1.1tn in tax cuts upon those earning over $500,000. Not only that, the 1m households earning over $1m a year would receive $105bn in tax cuts in 2027 – that’s more than the tax cuts going to the 127m households earning under $100,000.Republicans defend their painful program cuts as healthy, saying they will hold down the budget deficit. But there is of course a far less painful and more worker-friendly way to reduce the budget deficit: don’t extend the trillions in Trump tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor the rich.When Trump boasts about the “big, beautiful” bill, he talks only about the tax cuts, but never about how the cuts in Medicaid and Snap (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) will hurt millions of families. The Republican party consistently fails to note that one in four small-business owners and one in four veterans live in households that receive help from Snap, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Under the planned cuts to Snap, 42 million people – including one in five children in the US – could see their food assistance reduced.According to the Penn Wharton Budget model, when one factors in the Medicaid and Snap cuts along with the tax cuts, the Trump-House bill would cause Americans earning less than $17,000 a year to lose $1,030 on average in after-tax income starting in 2026. Households earning between $17,000 and $51,000 a year would lose around $700 on average. The very wealthy do far better. For those in the richest 0.1% – that is, households earning at least $4.3m a year – their after-tax income would jump by over $388,000.That doesn’t sound very pro-worker to me. It’s a perversion of the truth for Trump to boast of his pro-worker bona fides when he steadfastly refuses to push for the two things that would do most to lift workers’ living standards: push to raise workers’ pay and push to strengthen labor unions and worker bargaining power. Not only has Trump done nothing to increase the paltry $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, but he killed a Biden-era regulation that required federal contractors to pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour. Now many of those workers will see their pay sink to $13.30 an hour. What’s more, Trump has sought to sabotage unions, not strengthen them. He has moved to strip 1 million federal employees of their right to bargain while also seeking to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, which protects workers’ ability to bargain for better pay and conditions.As for Trump’s call to end the tax on tips, that will help many restaurant servers and hotel housekeepers, but the Yale Budget Lab says that provision has a narrow scope and will help less than 3% of all workers.Last year, candidate Trump said: “As soon as I get to office, we will make housing much more affordable.” But second-term Trump is doing just the opposite. His budget calls for a devastating 40% cut in rental assistance that millions of Americans rely on to pay their monthly rent. Candidate Trump also said: “Your heating and air conditioning, electricity, gasoline – all can be cut down in half.” But for millions of Americans he is increasing that burden by pushing to end a program that helps six million struggling households afford to heat and cool their homes.Many blue-collar Americans are eager to send their kids to college, but Trump and House Republicans would make that harder. Around one in eight Americans have federal student loans, which have been key to enabling millions of people to afford college. But Republicans want to eliminate subsidized loans for undergraduates and increase the minimum monthly payments that low-income borrowers already have a hard time paying.Trump boasts he is pro-worker, but he is doing absolutely nothing to help with what many workers say are their biggest priorities: making housing more affordable, reducing the cost of childcare and healthcare, making it easier to send one’s kids to college, and bringing down prices. Billionaires can rejoice that Trump is capitulating to them and their priorities, but American workers shouldn’t be fooled into believing that Trump is addressing their needs.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Trump says he’s ‘seriously considering’ taking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public

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      Donald Trump said he will make a decision in the near future about taking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public, a move which he said he is giving “very serious consideration”.In a post on Truth Social, the US president said he will speak with treasury secretary, Scott Bessent; commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick; and federal housing finance director, William Pulte, about doing so.He added: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing very well, throwing off a lot of CASH, and the time would seem to be right. Stay tuned!”These two companies are the backbone of the US housing market. Together they support about 70% of US mortgages.Fannie and Freddie, which operate as for-profit corporations with private shareholders, were created by the US Congress to expand the national home lending market by buying home loans from private lenders and repackaging them as mortgage-backed securities.When the housing market collapsed in 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac suffered overwhelming losses. To avoid catastrophic effects for the US economy, they were placed in conservatorship under the newly created Federal Housing Finance Agency.Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York and member of the Housing for US coalition, on Wednesday called on Trump to invest the expected $250bn in proceeds from the sale of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into middle-income housing, after the commander-in-chief announced he’s moving forward to release the government-sponsored enterprises from conservatorship.“President Trump is right to free Fannie and Freddie. But even better, let’s use the proceeds – some $250bn – to build middle-class housing for American workers by American workers. Housing for US stands ready to work with President Trump to make it happen.”Previous attempts to rid government control of the organizations, including under Trump’s first term in office, have been unsuccessful.In February, Bessent said the release of Fannie and Freddie from their conservatorship would depend on mortgage rate implications.“The priority for a Fannie and Freddie release, the most important metric that I’m looking at, is any study or hint that mortgage rates would go up,” Bessent said in an interview with Bloomberg.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      The US credit rating has been downgraded. But there’s an easy fix for our debt | Robert Reich

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      On Friday, the credit rating of the United States was downgraded. Moody’s, the ratings firm, announced that the government’s rising debt levels would grow further if the Trump Republican package of new tax cuts were enacted. This makes lending to the US riskier.Moody’s is the third of the three major credit-rating agencies to downgrade the credit rating of the United States.So-called “bond vigilantes” have already been selling the US government’s debt, as the Republican tax package moves through Congress. They’re expected to sell even more, driving long-term interest rates even higher to make up for the growing risk of holding US debt.Some rightwing Republicans in Congress are using the Moody’s downgrade to justify deeper spending cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other social programs that lower-income Americans depend on.But, hello? There’s a far easier way to reduce the federal debt. Just end the Trump tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy and big corporations – and instead raise taxes on them.I’m old enough to remember when the US’s super-rich financed the government with their tax payments. Under Dwight Eisenhower – hardly a leftwing radical – the highest marginal tax rate was 91%. (Even after all tax credits and deductions were figured in, the super-rich paid way over half their top marginal incomes in taxes.)But since the Reagan, George W Bush and Trump 1 tax cuts, tax rates on the super-rich have plummeted.So instead of financing the government with their taxes, the super-rich have been financing the US government by lending it money.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion(You may have heard that the US’s debt is held mainly by foreigners. Wrong. More than 70% of it is held by Americans – and most of them are wealthy.)This means that an ever-increasing portion of the taxes from the rest of us are dedicated to paying ever-increasing interest payments on the debt – payments that go largely to the super-rich.So when the debt of the United States is downgraded because Trump Republicans are planning another big tax cut mainly benefiting the rich and big corporations, most Americans could end up paying in three different ways:

      They’ll pay even more interest on the growing debt – to the super-rich.

      They’ll pay higher interest rates on all other long-term debt. (As higher rates on treasury bonds waft through the economy, they raise borrowing costs on everything from mortgages to auto loans.)

      The debt crisis will give Republicans even more excuse to do what they’re always wanting to do: slash safety nets. So many Americans could lose benefits they rely on, such as Medicaid and food stamps.
      The “bond vigilantes” are not the cause of this absurdity. Neither is Moody’s or the other credit-rating agencies. Nor, for that matter, is the growing national debt.What’s the underlying cause? Just follow the money. It’s the growing political power of the super-rich and big corporations to lower their taxes at the expense of most Americans.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Trump visits Capitol to urge House Republicans to pass ‘big, beautiful bill’

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      Donald Trump traveled to the Capitol on Tuesday to insist that the fractious House Republican majority set aside their differences and pass his wide-ranging bill to enact his taxation and immigration priorities.In a speech to a closed-door meeting of Republican lawmakers in Congress’s lower chamber, the president pushed representatives from districts in blue states to drop their demands for a bigger State and Local Tax (Salt) deduction, and also sought to assuage moderates concerned that the legislation, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, would hobble the Medicaid health insurance program.“I think we have unbelievable unity. I think we’re going to get everything we want, and I think we’re going to have a great victory,” Trump said as he left the meeting.But it is unclear if the president’s exhortations had the intended effect ahead of the Monday deadline that House speaker Mike Johnson has set to get the bill passed through the chamber, which Republicans control by a mere three votes. Following his meeting, at least one key lawmaker said he remained opposed to the bill as written, while others announced no changes to their position.“As it stands right now, I do not support the bill,” said New York congressman Mike Lawler, one of the Republicans representing districts in Democratic-led states that are demanding a larger Salt deduction.The next test of the bill’s prospects is scheduled for 1am on Wednesday, when the rules committee convenes for a procedural vote that, if successful, clears the way for consideration of the measure by the full House of Representatives.The nearly 1,100-page legislation is Trump’s top priority in Congress, and would codify several of his campaign promises, including making permanent or extending tax cuts enacted during his first term, temporarily ending the taxation of tips and overtime and paying for a wall along the border with Mexico and the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.To offset its costs, House Republicans have approved slashing federal safety net programs like Medicaid, which covers poor and low income Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap). But even with those cuts, the bill is estimated to cost $3.8tn through 2034, rankling rightwing fiscal hardliners who want to see the measure reduce the government’s large budget deficit.Johnson and other Republican leaders have spent weeks trying to square their demands with the blue-state Republicans and moderates wary of slashing safety net programs. As he arrived at the Capitol on Tuesday morning, Trump quickly made it known who he favored in the negotiations, insisting that “we’re not touching” Medicaid and that cuts would only hit “waste, fraud and abuse”.While Salt taxes were once fully deductible on federal returns, the tax cuts Trump signed in 2017, imposed a $10,000 cap . The president said he opposed increasing the deduction, because “we don’t want to benefit Democrat governors.”At his meeting with lawmakers, “he was emphatic, we need to quit screwing around. That was the clear message. You all have tinkered enough, it is time to land the plane,” South Dakota congressman Dusty Johnson told reporters.“Ninety-eight percent of that conference is ready to go. They were enthused. They were pumped up by the president, and I think with the holdouts, he did move them. I don’t know that we are there yet, but that was a hugely impactful meeting.”Under the bill, Medicaid would receive a $715bn budget reduction, mostly by imposing work requirements on recipients. After the meeting, Don Bacon, a Nebraska moderate who had warned against cutting Medicaid too deeply, signaled approval of the bill, saying: “We did as well as we could do.”But David Valadao, whose central California district has one of the large shares of Medicaid recipients nationwide, said he was “very concerned” about the impact of the cuts.The Democratic minority is largely powerless to stop the bill from advancing in the House, and the GOP’s use of the budget reconciliation procedure means the bill cannot be blocked by a filibuster in the Senate. Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and James McGovern, the ranking member on the rules committee, called for the panel’s consideration of the bill to be rescheduled, noting it is currently set to take place “during the dead of night”.“It is deeply troubling that you would attempt to jam this legislation down the throats of the American people. What else are you hiding? It is imperative that you immediately reschedule the meeting so that it may be debated in the light of day,” they wrote in a letter to Johnson and the rules committee’s Republican chair.House GOP leaders cast the president’s visit as a sign to their members that it was time to stop quibbling.Majority leader Steve Scalise told a press conference after Trump departed: “President Trump had a strong and clear message to a packed House Republican conference, and that is, after months of long, intense discussions over really important differences and issues, this One Big, Beautiful Bill has come through the committee process, and it’s time to end the negotiations, unify behind this bill and get it passed on to the Senate.”Yet it was plain that there are kinks left to iron out. Johnson declined to take questions at the press conference, saying he had to leave to “gather up the small subgroups in the House Republican Conference and tie up the remaining loose ends. I’m very confident that we’ll be able to do that.” More

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      As key Israel allies threaten action over Gaza catastrophe, Washington is largely unmoved

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      As Israel orders Palestinians to evacuate Khan Younis in advance of what it calls an “unprecedented attack” on Gaza, much of Washington remains largely unmoved, even as Canada and European countries threaten “concrete actions” if Israel does not scale back its offensive.Despite reports of growing pressure from the Trump administration to increase aid into Gaza, where widespread famine looms, the White House continues to publicly back Israel. National security council spokesperson James Hewitt told the Guardian in an email: “Hamas has rejected repeated ceasefire proposals, and therefore bears sole responsibility for this conflict,” maintaining the policy stance inherited from the previous Biden administration despite mounting evidence of humanitarian catastrophe.The Israeli military on Monday instructed residents of southern Gaza’s Khan Younis to “evacuate immediately” as it prepares to “destroy the capabilities of terrorist organizations” – signalling plans for intensified bombardment in a war that has already claimed more than 53,000 Palestinian lives, according to Gaza’s health ministry.Despite Israeli promises to “flatten” Gaza, opposition from Congress – and mainstream Democrats more broadly – has been largely muted. While the besieged territory faces what the World Health Organization (Who) calls “one of the world’s worst hunger crises”, more than three dozen members of Congress from both parties recently appeared in an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) video in celebration of Israel’s 77th birthday. In New York, leading mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo held up an Israeli flag in the city’s annual Israel Day Parade on Sunday.This political genuflection comes as a March Gallup poll shows American support for Israel has dropped to 46% – its lowest point in 25 years – while sympathy for Palestinians has risen to a record 33%. Democrats reported sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis by a three-to-one ratio.On a recent episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Senator Bernie Sanders blamed Washington’s reluctance to change course on the financial muscle of lobbying groups. “If you speak up on that issue, you’ll have super Pacs like Aipac going after you,” Sanders said, noting Aipac’s record $14.5m campaign to unseat Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman after he accused Israel of genocide.A small contingent of progressive lawmakers continue to voice opposition despite being largely iced out from public discourse in Washington. Representative Delia Ramirez of Illinois condemned the “lethal, unaccountable, extremist duo” of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump. “Americans have said they do not want to be complicit in their barbaric campaigns. It is time for us in Congress to exercise our power and take action. Not one more cent, not one more bomb, not one more excuse,” she told the Guardian.Representative Ilhan Omar similarly decried the latest chapter of the lopsided war on Gaza, calling it “another unconscionable moral stain”.“Despite the fanfare of Donald Trump’s trip [to the Middle East last weak], they’re not closer to a ceasefire,” Omar said. “It is deeply shameful that innocent civilians are continuing to pay the price.”Vermont senator Peter Welch recently led 29 Senate colleagues in introducing a resolution calling on the Trump administration to end the blockade of humanitarian aid. “It’s been over two months since the Israeli government has been using its power to withhold food, medicine, lifesaving cancer treatments, dialysis systems, formula, and more from starving and suffering families across Gaza,” he said.Resolutions, however, are symbolic gestures meant to publicize opinions and do not have the force of law.While the lawmakers voice their concerns, their impact on policy remains limited, representing the growing disconnect between Washington policymakers and public sentiment. That the grassroots movement for Palestinian rights in the US has grown more subdued – in large part due to an aggressive crackdown by the Trump administration against the universities that were host to last year’s protests – may take some of the pressure off for them to act.One insider familiar with discussions between the US and Israel told the Washington Post that the Americans have been hitting Israel with a tougher stance over the last few weeks. Haaretz has also reported growing pressure by the US on Israel to agree to a framework for a temporary ceasefire.“Trump’s people are letting Israel know: ‘We will abandon you if you do not end this war,’” the insider said. Trump and JD Vance both skipped over Israel on recent trips abroad, widely interpreted as a snub of Netanyahu.Netanyahu has announced the resumption of “minimal” humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the UN said on Monday that nine aid trucks were authorised to enter Gaza, a “drop in the ocean” given the scale of desperation.Whether US voices calling for change in US policy and a wind-down of the catastrophic war are just shouting in the void, may become clearer in the coming days. More

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      Judge blocks Trump officials’ efforts to dismantle US Institute of Peace

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      A federal judge on Monday blocked efforts by the Trump administration and its so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to dismantle the US Institute of Peace, at least temporarily.Doge, initially overseen by billionaire Donald Trump supporter Elon Musk, took over the congressionally created and funded thinktank in March and had fired most employees by a late-night email after the US president targeted the institute and three other agencies with an executive order.The takeover prompted a couple of lawsuits against Doge and the Trump administration, including from fired employees, trying to impede the institute’s dismantling. The White House claimed the thinktank was in “non-compliance” with Trump’s executive order, whose purported aim was to shrink the federal government’s size. And Doge staff forcefully entered the thinktank’s building after cancelling its contract for private security.US district court judge Beryl Howell on Monday ruled that Doge illegally took over the institute through “blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers from three separate local and federal agencies”.The judge ruled as “null and void” all actions against the US Institute of Peace – including the removal of its board and the transfer of its property to the government services administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe institute employed about 300 people. Besides human resources staffers and a few overseas employees, most at the institute were fired.A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, claimed in an email that the institute was taken over and most of its employees dismissed because it “has failed to deliver peace” – and that Trump “is carrying out his mandate to eliminate bloat and save taxpayer dollars”.A statement from an attorney who filed the dismissed US Institute of Peace’s employees suit said their workplace’s takeover “was a case of egregious government overreach”.The statement added: “Armed agents forcing their way into an independent nonprofit’s privately-owned headquarters, seizing its assets, and destroying records – all in the name of so-called ‘efficiency.’”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Republicans are attacking childcare funding. Their goal? To push women out of the workforce | Moira Donegan

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      Last month, the White House issued a proposed budget to Congress that completely eliminated funding for Head Start, the six-decade-old early childhood education program for low-income families that serves as a source of childcare for large swaths of the American working class.The funding was restored in the proposed budget after an outcry, but large numbers of employees who oversee the program at the office of Head Start were laid off in a budget-slashing measure under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. On Thursday, Kennedy said funding for the program would not be axed, but more cuts to childcare funding are likely coming: some Republicans have pushed to repeal a five-decade-old tax credit for daycare. The White House is entertaining proposals on how to incentivize and structurally coerce American women into bearing more children, but it seems to be determined to make doing so as costly to those women’s careers as possible.That’s because the Republicans’ childcare policy, like their pro-natalist policy, is based on one goal: undoing the historic gains in women’s rights and status, and pushing American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society – and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.The New York Times reported this week that the White House is now not only looking for ways to make more women have children, but to encourage “parents” to stay home to raise them. “Parents” here is a euphemism. Roughly 80% of stay-at-home parents are mothers: cultural traditions that encourage women, and not men, to sacrifice their careers for caregiving, along with persistent wage inequalities that make women, on the whole, lower earners than their male partners, both incentivize women, and not men, to drop out of the workforce and stay home when they have children.This state of affairs has been worsened by the dramatic rise in the cost of childcare, which is prohibitively expensive for many parents. The average cost of childcare per child per year in the US is now well north of $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, an industry advocacy group. In major cities such as New York, that price is significantly higher: from $16,000 to $19,000 per year. Existing tax credits need to be expanded, not eliminated, to reduce this burden on mothers and their families and to enable women to join the workforce at rates comparable to men and commensurate with their dignity and capacities. Currently, 26% of mothers do not engage in paid work, a figure that has barely budged in 40 years. Largely because of the unequally distributed burdens of childcare, men participate in the paid labor force at a rate that is more than 10% higher than women.One might think that the solution would be to invest more in high-quality childcare, so that providers could open more slots, children could access more resources, and women could go to work and expend their talents in productive ways that earn them money, make use of their gifts and provide more dignity for women and more stability for families. This is not what the American right is proposing: Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who promotes traditional family and gender relations, has called such policy initiatives “work-ist”. Conservatives are proposing, instead, that women go back to the kitchen.The Trump administration, and the American right more broadly, wants the rate of women’s employment to be even lower, because it is advancing a lie that women are naturally, inevitably, uniformly and innately inclined to caregiving, child rearing and homemaking – and not to the positions of intellectual achievement, responsibility, leadership, ingenuity or independence that women may aspire to in the public world. “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hardwired to bond with Mom,” says Janet Erickson, a fellow at the rightwing Institute for Family Studies, who once co-authored an op-ed with JD Vance calling on “parents” to drop out of the workforce to raise children. “I just think, why should we deny that?”This kind of vague, evidence-free gesturing toward evolutionary psychology – the notion that babies are “hardwired” to prefer mothers who are not employed – is a common conservative tick: a recourse to dishonest and debunked science to lend empiricism to bigotry. There is in fact no evolutionary reason, and no biological reason, for mothers, and not fathers, to abandon independence, ambition or life outside the home for the sake of a child. The only reason is a sexist one.Over the past decade, the left launched few vigorous defenses of a feminist politics that seeks to advance and secure women’s access to public life, paid work and fair remuneration. The American left has launched vigorous criticisms of the “girlboss”, a figure of malignant female ambition who seemed to make the exploitations of capitalism more offensive by virtue of her sex, and it has instead offered critiques of women’s ambition and romantic defenses of the labor of “care” that just happens to overlap with women’s traditional – and traditionally unpaid – roles in the home. This leftwing rhetoric has at times mirrored the similar romanticization of the unpaid housewife of yesteryear from the right, which has embraced tradwives, homesteading fantasies and an aestheticized rustic simplicity that aims to contrast feminist gains in the workforce with a fantasy of women’s rest. Together, these strains of rhetorical opposition to women in the workforce have made anti-feminism into a new kind of “socialism of fools” – a misguided misdirection of anger and resentment at the rapaciousness of capitalism towards a social justice movement for the rights of an oppressed class.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut what is on offer from the political right is not about the refashioning of work and life to be less extractive and exploitative for women, and particularly for mothers. It is instead about a sex segregation of human experience, an effort to make much of public life inaccessible to women. Combined with the right wing’s successful attack on the right to abortion, the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to Title X programs that provide contraceptive access, and the rescinding of federal grants aimed at helping working women, what emerges from the rightwing policy agenda is an effort to force women out of education, out of decently paid work and into pregnancy, unemployment and dependence on men.Theirs is an effort to shelter men from women’s economic competition, to revert to the regressive cultural modes of an imagined past, and to impose an artificially narrow vision of the capacities, aspirations, talents and desires of half of the American people.Murray Rothbard, the paleoconservative 20th-century economist whose ideas have had a profound influence on the Trumpist worldview, once vowed: “We shall repeal the 20th century.” As far as the Republican right is concerned, it seems to want to repeal the gains of 20th-century feminism first.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      US House Republicans propose fees on immigrants to fund Trump’s crackdown

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      Congressional Republicans are proposing an array of new fees on immigrants seeking to remain in the United States in a move that advocates warn will create insurmountable financial barriers.Legislation moving through the GOP-controlled House of Representatives could require immigrants to pay potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars to seek asylum, care for a minor in the government’s custody, or apply for humanitarian parole.Republican lawmakers have described the fees as necessary to offset the costs of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. But experts who work with immigrants say putting more economic pressure on people attempting to navigate US immigration laws could drain what little money they have, force them into exploitative work arrangements, or push them to leave the country altogether.“These are essentially a mask for targeted attacks towards some of the most vulnerable immigrants that we currently have going through our legal system right now: asylum seekers, children, survivors of crimes,” said Victoria Maqueda Feldman, director of legal programs at Ayuda, which assists low-income immigrants in Washington DC, Virginia and Maryland.Trump has made it a priority of his administration to not only rid the country of undocumented immigrants, but also to stop many new immigrants from entering the country. The GOP-controlled Congress is negotiating what he has dubbed “one big, beautiful bill”, a huge spending and taxation package that includes provisions to turn his hardline immigration proposals into reality.Republicans are limited in what they can accomplish in Congress due to the Senate’s filibuster, which the Democratic minority can use to block legislation it does not support. The GOP is seeking to enact Trump’s legislative agenda through the budget reconciliation procedure, under which bills can pass with simple majorities in both chambers but must affect only spending and revenues – like fees.“This system has left these agencies with funding shortfalls paid for by American taxpayers,” said Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House judiciary committee. “The fees included in this bill will … allow us to make the necessary investments in immigration enforcement in a fiscally responsible manner.”Heidi Altman, vice-president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said the new fees appeared targeted at the sorts of immigrants that the Trump administration has prioritized keeping out, such as asylum seekers, who arrived in large numbers during Joe Biden’s term.“It’s part of the administration’s assault on humanitarian protections for immigrant communities,” Altman said. “This is an entire new way of thinking about fees as a penalty, essentially, for an immigrant status.”Under the bill, immigrants would have to pay $1,000 to apply for asylum, $100 to keep an application active each year as it makes it through the overburdened immigration system, and $550 for a work permit. People requesting humanitarian parole to enter the United States would have to pay $1,000, and abused or neglected children who qualify for a program called Special Immigrant Juvenile Status would have to pay $500. Immigration cases can take a long time to resolve in court, but if a defendant asks a judge for a continuance, they would have to pay $100 each time.These fees do not exist under current law, and the bill specifies they cannot be waived in almost all circumstances.The new fees are targeted at people, often relatives, who seek to sponsor children who crossed the border without a parent or guardian and wind up in the government’s care. In order to take custody of an unaccompanied minor, adults would have to pay $3,500 to partially pay back the government for the minor’s care, along with another $5,000 to ensure the child attends their court hearings, though that money can be reimbursed if they do.“In some cases, that would be placing $3,500 between a mother or a father being able to get their child out of government custody and back into their own home,” Altman said.The fees were proposed as the Trump administration looks for novel ways to push immigrants out, including by offering them cash to leave. The bill gives a preview of what more will come, should the president receive the tens of billions of dollars he has requested from Congress.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore than $50bn is allocated in the legislation to construct a wall along the border with Mexico, as well as fortifications elsewhere. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will receive $45bn for detention facilities, $14bn for its deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire 10,000 new agents by 2029.For the low-income clients Ayuda serves, Feldman predicted that the fees “could amount to a complete barrier to forms of relief”.Some might be able to pull together the money, but “through means that could put them in greater danger. So, having to work under the table, putting them at risk for labor trafficking. They might have to take out loans that have very high interest rates, putting them at risk for having to pay off something that is very expensive.”The bill is a top priority of congressional Republicans, but its pathway to enactment is unclear. On Friday, rightwing Republican lawmakers blocked its progress through a key House committee, arguing it did not cut government spending deeply enough.Last month, when the judiciary committee met to approve the portion of the bill that included the fee increases, GOP lawmakers approved it quickly, with little signs of dissent. More