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      If leaders stay silent, the US won’t survive Trump’s next 100 days | Robert Reich

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      We have witnessed the first 100 days of the odious Trump regime.The US constitution is in peril. Civil and human rights are being trampled upon. The economy is in disarray.At this rate, we will not make it through the second 100 days.Federal judges in more than 120 cases so far have sought to stop Trump – judges appointed by Republicans as well as Democrats, some appointed by Trump himself – but the regime is either ignoring or appealing their orders. It has even arrested a municipal judge in Milwaukee amid a case involving an undocumented defendant.Recently, Judge J Harvie Wilkinson III of the court of appeals for the fourth circuit – an eminent conservative Reagan appointee who is revered by the Federalist Society – issued a scathing rebuke to the Trump regime. In response to its assertion that it can abduct residents of the US and put them into foreign prisons without due process, Wilkinson wrote:
      If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.
      Wilkinson’s fears are already being realized. Ice recently deported three US citizens – aged two, four and seven – when their mothers were deported to Honduras. One of the children, who has stage 4 cancer, was sent out of the US without medication or consultation with doctors.Meanwhile, the regime continues to attack all the independent institutions in this country that have traditionally served as buffers against tyranny – universities, non-profits, lawyers and law firms, the media, science and researchers, libraries and museums, the civil service and independent agencies – threatening them with extermination or loss of funding if they do not submit to its oversight and demands.Trump has even instructed the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, the platform that handles the fundraising for almost all Democratic candidates and the issues Democrats support.Meanwhile, Trump is actively destroying the economy. His proposed tariffs are already raising prices. His attacks on the Fed chief, Jerome Powell, are causing tremors around the world.Trump wants total power, even at the cost of our democracy and economy.His polls are plummeting yet many Americans are still in denial. “He’s getting things done!” some say. “He’s tough and strong!”Every American with any shred of authority must loudly and boldly explain the danger we are in.A few Democratic members and progressives in Congress (Bernie Sanders, AOC, Cory Booker, Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy) have expressed outrage, but most seem oddly quiet. Granted, they have no direct power to stop what is occurring but they cannot and must not appear to acquiesce. They need to be heard, every day – protesting, demanding, resisting, refusing.Barack Obama has spoken up at least once, to his credit, but where is my old boss, Bill Clinton? Where is George W Bush? Where are their former vice-presidents – Al Gore and Dick Cheney? Where are their former cabinet members? They all must be heard, too.What about Republican members of Congress? Are none willing to stand up against what is occurring? And what of Republican governors and state legislators? If there were ever a time for courage and integrity, it is now. Their silence is inexcusable.Over 400 university presidents have finally issued a letter opposing “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education”. Good. Now they must speak out against the overreach endangering all of American democracy.Hundreds of law firms have joined a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the law firm Perkins Coie’s appeal of the regime’s demands. Fine. Now, they along with the American Bar Association and every major law school must sound the alarm about Trump’s vindictive and abusive use of the justice department.America’s religious leaders have a moral obligation to speak out. They have a spiritual duty to their congregations and to themselves to make their voices heard.The leaders of American business – starting with Jamie Dimon, the chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who in normal times has assumed the role of spokesperson for American business – have been conspicuously silent. Of course they fear Trump’s retribution. Of course they hope for a huge tax cut. But these hardly excuse their seeming assent to the destruction of American democracy.We have witnessed what can happen in just the first 100 days. I’m not at all sure we can wait until the 2026 midterm elections and hope that Democrats take back at least one chamber of Congress. At the rate this regime is wreaking havoc, too much damage will have been done by then.The nation is tottering on the edge of dictatorship.We are no longer Democrats or Republicans. We are either patriots fighting the regime or we are complicit in its tyranny. There is no middle ground.Soon, I fear, the regime will openly defy the supreme court. Americans must be mobilized into such a huge wave of anger and disgust that members of the House are compelled to impeach Trump (for the third time) and enough senators are moved to finally convict him.Then this shameful chapter of American history will end.

      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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      Senate Democrats to mark Trump’s ‘100 days from hell’ with marathon speeches

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      Democratic senators will on Tuesday mark Donald Trump’s 100th day in office with marathon floor speeches intended to highlight his administration’s failures, seizing on his divisive tariff policy and attacks on the judiciary to argue he was not joking when he mulled governing as “a dictator”.Republicans, meanwhile, praised the president’s actions over the first 100 days, though the House speaker, Mike Johnson, acknowledged “some bumps along the road” he described as the necessary byproduct of the radical changes Trump campaigned on.The 100-day milestone has given Trump’s allies and enemies alike in Congress an opportunity to reflect on his presidency, which Democrats, confined to the minority in both the Senate and House of Representatives at least through next year, argue has accomplished little besides haphazardly dismantling important federal agencies and rendering precarious a previously robust economy.“Donald Trump’s first 100 days have been 100 days from hell,” said Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader.“Donald Trump is not governing like a president of a democratic republic. He’s acting like a king, a despot, a wannabe dictator. Remember that during the campaign, he indicated that he’d be a dictator just on day one. But everything we’ve seen so far shows he wants to be a dictator for much, much longer.”Democrats are looking to regain their popular support after underperforming in November, when voters nationwide sent Trump back to the White House with Republicans in full control of Congress.Earlier this month, New Jersey’s Cory Booker spent 25 hours on the Senate floor condemning Trump in a record-breaking speech, while on Sunday, Booker and the top House Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, were out for more than 12 hours on the Capitol steps, condemning the GOP’s plans for a huge bill that will extend tax cuts and pay for mass deportations, potentially by cutting social safety net programs.The tactics have been compared to those of the civil rights and other protest movements, and on Tuesday, Schumer said Democrats would hold the Senate floor “until late tonight to mark these dismal 100 days by speaking the truth”.“What is the truth? The truth is this: no president in modern history has promised more on day one and delivered less by day 100 than Donald Trump. In record time, the president has turned a golden promise into an economic ticking timebomb. It’s getting worse every day, and he calls it progress.”Republicans have taken the opposite view of Trump’s record, promoting his moves to ban diversity initiatives in the government and elsewhere, crack down on transgender rights, block immigrants from crossing the border and attempt to step up deportations as “promises made, promises kept”.“We’re just getting started, and that’s one of the reasons that we’re so excited,” Johnson told reporters.But opinion surveys have found that Trump’s approval rating has sunk into the negative at a point earlier than his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, whose presidency wound up mired in public discontent. The plunge in popularity for a president who just over five months ago became the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades is viewed as a consequence of his disruptive approach to implementing tariffs, and his administration’s attacks on a judiciary that has sought to temper some of his policies.“There’s some bumps along the road. I mean, we’re changing everything,” Johnson replied, when asked about the president’s approval ratings.“The last four years was an absolute unmitigated disaster, and we got to fix it all. So when you’re doing that, it’s disruptive in a way.” More

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      Why is the US sleeping as autocracy approaches? | Governor Jay Inslee

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      When a woman asked me a couple of weeks ago why leaders were not standing up to Donald Trump, my thoughts went immediately to political leaders. When I started to answer, she corrected me and said: “No, no, I’m talking about college presidents and law firms. Where the heck are they?”Where indeed? From all observations, most have been asleep as the US president dismantles democracy piece by jeweled piece. They are either cutting sweet little deals on their knees, or just remaining silent as the fruits of 250 years of national labor and life are strangled by Trump’s tentacles. From the cowering of major media companies to the shameful capitulation of some law firms, and oppressive silence from virtually all of them, the nation is sleepwalking into a slow but ever encroaching totalitarian state.As the woman continued her outpouring of anger and grief, I thought of John F Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, Why England Slept, his brilliant exposition of why a proud and resilient nation ignored Germany’s mounting threat to their democracy when it was so obvious and imminent. Kennedy recognized the centrality of moments we now face, writing: “Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It’s the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” We are now being pinched by an autocrat who eats laws for breakfast and will not be stopped by any internal restraint.Whether our democracy survives to preserve the rule of law depends on so much more than senators and representatives. In a way, they are merely personal reflections of the public’s will. Depending exclusively on their personal commitment to the constitution is a good bet for the party now in the minority, but a sore loser for the majority party, or more accurately, the majority cult. The moment demands so much more than eloquence on the floor of the House and the Senate – it demands full-throated, continuous and united rebellion against the perverse oppression and malignant illegality of this authoritarian in the White House.Unfortunately, we are not seeing the necessary courage, not in the east, not in the west, not in large law firms, not in boardrooms, not in school district superintendents, not in chambers of commerce. The silence is deafening.Where was the united voice of major law firms when Trump maliciously began to target several of them? They were hiding. Where are the concerted voices of college presidents as their colleagues are being hung out to dry? Do they not teach history at these colleges, where any freshman could tell you that the Trump plan is right out of every autocrat’s playbook? First you tame the press, then you tame the colleges, then you tame the law firms so that no one can even get to court, then you eventually ignore the orders of the supreme court.We are well on our way to that final death knell of democracy, as we advance through the first three steps.My motivation to rally for our country is not driven solely by my love for democracy. Like millions of Americans, I see my own family being jeopardized by Trump’s callousness. I have seen first-hand the power of special education teachers to raise the prospects of special needs kids in my clan. I rebel at the Musk-Trump administration’s chainsaw attack eliminating the one agency that safeguards our kids’ access to special education investments, the US Department of Education. To Elon Musk, the department may be just a bureaucracy – to our family, it is a guardian angel.Is this passivity and lack of resistance understandable? Of course it is. That’s why the old saw “first they come for the … then they come for you” was invented.But we should call upon our college presidents, law firms, leaders of civil society, to get in touch with their responsibility to democracy itself, as well as their own institutions, which surely will end up on the firing line someday if Trump continues to be emboldened by his victims’ servility.Perhaps it is too strong to refer to these organizations as collaborators. Perhaps. But this wholesale timidity and collapse must be considered rank appeasement at best, modest complicity at worst.Kudos to Harvard University, Perkins Coie and others who have stood up, but some of the finest higher educational institutions in world history are now ignoring the well-trod path of autocracy in world history. Some of the best and brightest law firms in the nation are now providing free legal services to the very administration that has broken laws beyond counting the very legal codes the law firms purport to defend.Certainly, these silent aiders and abettors can explain their individual decision making, but their cumulative damage to the very fabric of democracy calls us to heed Benjamin Franklin when he said we must “all hang together, or all hang separately”. Is it asking too much for the college presidents of the US to band together and say this choking of research funds is unacceptable? Are the law firms just too busy to all say they are not going to yield to Trump’s perverse bullying and say what any good lawyer ought to say: “We’ll see you in court”?In fighting Trump’s assaults on democracy, I speak from experience. As the first governor to come out against his Muslim ban, one of the most vocal in speaking out against his Covid negligence, and telling him to his face to stop tweeting and start protecting our children, earning me the honor of being called a “snake”, I know standing up brings the heat. So be it.But my more important experience is decades watching a courageous citizenry force its federal government to change course. In the 50s and 60s, the government was forced to change, thanks in large part to a woman refusing to sit in the back of the bus. In the 70s, the Vietnam war ended only because thousands marched, including myself, proving the ability of committed people, though unelected, to compel change. In the 80s it was private citizens who forced the federal government to start treating HIV patients like humans.In each of these decades, small acts of defiance led to national change as courage rippled outwards. The benefit of having lived these decades during the American experiment is learning that leaders in civil society who resist should be exalted, joined, and followed.Those who believe that this call to action is an overstatement of the threat understand neither the nature of the tyrant-in-chief nor the slow but inexorable nature of how democracies are lost. I witnessed Trump’s cruelty and lack of empathy as I dealt with him during the Covid pandemic, as he willfully withheld help and then consciously spread misinformation that caused so many needless deaths. Anyone who saw this up close would make the call for resistance I am making today. How can anyone not understand that the refusal to follow the law on January 6 continues in full force today? Why would it stop unless it is made to stop?More importantly, we should listen to the late Justice William O Douglas, who said: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” It is past time for all our leaders in civil society to wake up, stand up and speak up. We are right in calling them to do so. Hiding is no longer acceptable.

      Jay Inslee served as the governor of Washington from 2013-2025 More

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      Democrats in Congress warn cuts at top US labor watchdog will be ‘catastrophic’

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      Democrats have warned that cuts to the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to render the organization “basically ineffectual” and will be “catastrophic” for workers’ rights.The so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has targeted the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for cuts and ended its leases in several states.Representatives Bobby Scott, Mark DeSaulnier and Greg Casar have written to NLRB’s chair, Marvin Kaplan, and the acting general counsel, William Cowen, requesting answers on the cuts.“If the NLRB reduces its workforce and closes a number of regional offices, it will render the NLRB’s enforcement mechanism basically ineffectual, thereby chilling workers from exercising their rights to engage in union organizing and protected concerted activities,” they wrote.The letter noted the NLRB has already been suffering from drastic understaffing and budget constraints, while caseloads have increased. NLRB field staffing has declined by one-third in the last decade, while case intake per employee at the agency grew by 46%.“The harm to America’s workers by potential directives to reduce this independent agency’s workforce cannot be overstated,” the letter added. “Any NLRB reduction in force (RIF) or office closures would be catastrophic for workers’ rights.”The representatives also requested all information related to Doge’s role at the NLRB, including all communications Doge had with employees at the NLRB or regarding the NLRB with other agencies.Doge is led by billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. Musk’s SpaceX has challenged the constitutionality of the NLRB. A whistleblower at the NLRB told NPR earlier this month that Doge accessed sensitive data at the agency and took steps to cover their tracks in doing so.The National Labor Relations Board Union, representing workers at the agency, reported last week that Doge cancelled the NLRB regional office’s lease a year early in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ending it in August 2025.In March 2025, Doge terminated the lease for the NLRB regional office in Memphis, Tennessee. In February 2025, Doge terminated the leases for NLRB offices in Buffalo, New York; Puerto Rico; Los Angeles, California; Overland Park, Kansas; and Birmingham, Alabama.“The NLRB is an agency that has been starved of funding and resources for over a decade. We have seen massive staffing cuts simply from attrition. There is no need for any austerity measures with our operations; Congress has already done that to us.” the NLRB Union stated on social media.The NLRB declined to comment. More

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      Trump administration’s budget cuts endanger Meals on Wheels: ‘Life and death implications’

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      The Trump administration’s slashes to the Department of Health and Human Services is threatening Meals on Wheels, the popular program dedicated to combatting senior hunger and isolation. Despite decades of bipartisan support, Meals on Wheels now faces attacks from Republicans whose budget blueprint paves the way for deep cuts to nutrition and other social safety-net programs as a way to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.It’s a move anti-hunger advocates and policy experts warn could have disastrous ramifications for the millions of older Americans who rely on the program to eat each day.“It’s not hyperbolic to say that we’re going to be leaving people hungry and that this literally has life and death implications,” said Nicole Jorwic, the chief of advocacy and campaigns at Caring Across Generations, a non-profit that advocates for ageing Americans, disabled people and their caregivers. “This is not just about a nice-to-have program. These programs are necessities in the lives of seniors all over this country.”While it is still unknown exactly what will be slashed, the blueprint sets the stage for the potential elimination of the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), a key source of funding for local Meals on Wheels programs in 37 states, and serious cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) and Medicaid, which would increase food insecurity and hardship and steeply increase demand for Meals on Wheels services. The entire staff who oversaw SSBG have already been fired, according to reports.If Congress takes away SSBG funding and weakens other programs, seniors who rely on in-home deliveries or meals in community and senior centers to survive would receive less help as Meals on Wheels community providers would be forced to reduce services, add people to waitlists or turn seniors facing hunger away altogether. Some program operators who are already making tough choices about who to serve due to strained budgets and rising need have said it feels as though they are “playing God”.“We’re talking about lives here so it’s worrisome to me,” said Ellie Hollander, the president and CEO of Meals on Wheels America. “Some of our programs are already operating on razor-thin budgets and are pulling from their reserves. [If funding goes away], it could result in some programs having to close their doors.”In the US one in four Americans is over the age of 60 and nearly 13 million seniors are threatened by or experience hunger. Meals on Wheels America, a network of 5,000 community-based programs that feeds more than 2 million older Americans each year, has been a successful public-private partnership for more than 50 years. The Urban Institute estimates that the number of seniors in the US will more than double over the next 40 years.The Older Americans Act (OAA) nutrition program, which supports the health and wellbeing of seniors through nutrition services, is the network’s primary source of federal funding, covering 37% of what it takes to serve more than 250m meals each year. The exact mix of local, state, federal and private funding of Meals on Wheels’ thousands of on-the-ground community programs varies from provider to provider.Under the orders of the Elon Musk-led unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 20,000 people at HHS have lost their jobs in recent weeks, including at least 40% of the staff at the Administration for Community Living, which coordinates federal policy on ageing and disability. Since many of those staffers helped fulfill critical functions to serving older Americans through the OAA, some Meals on Wheels programs are worried about funding disbursements, reporting data and the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise.HHS has said it will reorganize the ACL into other HHS agencies, although how that would happen is unclear. The co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, composed of 62 member organizations that focus in part on ageing and disability, said in a recent statement: “This disruptive change threatens to increase rates of institutionalization, homelessness and long-lasting economic hardships.”Since experiencing multiple strokes that left her cognitively impaired and at risk for falls, Dierdre Mayes has relied on Meals on Wheels Yolo County to deliver meals that are the 64-year-old’s primary source of nutrition. “I’m really thriving off of the meals I get,” said Mayes, a Woodland, California, resident who also receives $20 a month in food stamps, which she uses to purchase cases of water. “The best part about it is I don’t have to go anywhere to get them.” For Mayes and other homebound older Americans, the program is a lifeline.The uncertainty around Meals on Wheels’ future is causing stress for seniors who are worried about how federal cuts, layoffs and tariffs will impact their daily deliveries. The non-profit FeedMore WNY, which serves homebound older adults in New York’s Erie and Niagara counties, said they’ve been hearing from fearful older clients as word of other recent cuts circulated in the news.Catherine Shick, the public relations manager for FeedMore WNY, said they served 4,775 unique Meals on Wheels clients last year and that demand for their feeding programs increased by 16% from 2023 to 2024, a trend they expect to continue. “Any cut to any funding has a direct impact on the individuals who rely on us for food assistance and any cuts are coming at a time when we know that food insecurity is on the rise,” she said. “We need the continued support of all levels of government, as well as the community, to be able to fulfill our mission.”In addition to delivering healthy, nutritious food, Meals on Wheels drivers, who are primarily volunteers, provide a host of other valuable services: they can look for signs of cognitive or other health changes. They can also address safety hazards in the home or provide pet support services, as well as offer crucial social connections since drivers are often the only person a senior may see in a given day or week.Deliveries have been shown to help keep seniors healthy and in their own homes and communities and out of costly institutional settings. Republicans in the House and Senate have said their goal is to reduce federal spending, but experts say cutting programs that help fund organizations such as Meals on Wheels would instead increase federal spending for healthcare and long-term care expenses for older Americans.“If people can’t stay in their own homes, they’re going to be ‘high flyers’ in hospitals and admitted prematurely into nursing homes,” said Hollander, “all of which cost taxpayers billions of dollars annually versus providing Meals on Wheels for one year to a senior for the same cost of being in the hospital for one day or 10 days in a nursing home.”Experts agree that even before the cuts, Meals on Wheels has been underfunded. Advocates and researchers say OAA hasn’t kept up with the rapid growth of the senior population, rising food costs or inflation. One in three local programs already have waiting lists with many programs already feeling stretched to their limits. For more than 60% of Meals on Wheels providers across the country, federal funding represents half or more of their total revenue, underscoring the serious damage that could be done if cuts or policy changes are made in any capacity.“It feels like a continuous slew of attacks on the programs that seniors rely on to be safe, independent and healthy in their own homes,” said Jorwic of Caring Across Generations. “Everything from cuts to Meals on Wheels to cuts to Medicaid, all these things that are being proposed and actively worked on being implemented, are a real threat to the security of aging Americans.” More

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      Hakeem Jeffries and Cory Booker livestream sit-in against GOP funding plan

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      House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries and New Jersey senator Cory Booker were holding a sit-in protest and discussion on Sunday on the steps of the US Capitol in opposition to Republicans’ proposed budget plan.Billed as an “Urgent Conversation with the American People”, the livestreamed discussion comes before Congress’s return to session on Monday, where Democrats hope to stall Republicans’ economic legislative agenda. Throughout the day, they were joined by other Democratic lawmakers, including the senator Raphael Warnock, who spoke as the sit-in passed the 10-hour mark.The proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year, the New York Times reported on Friday, includes cuts to programs that support childcare, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly.“Republican leaders have made clear their intention to use the coming weeks to advance a reckless budget scheme to President Trump’s desk that seeks to gut Medicaid, food assistance and basic needs programs that help people, all to give tax breaks to billionaires,” Booker and Jeffries aid in a statement.“Given what’s at stake, these could be some of the most consequential weeks for seniors, kids and families in generations,” they added.Booker wrote separately on X: “This is a moral moment in America. Sitting on the Capitol steps with Leader Hakeem Jeffries this morning to discuss what’s at stake with Trump’s budget and affirm the need for action to protect Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs.”Booker and Jeffries started their sit-in around 6am and were joined by lawmakers including Democratic senators Chris Coons and Angela Alsobrooks and representatives Gil Cisneros and Gabe Amo, among others.Reverend Dr William J Barber II and the National Education Association president, Becky Pringle, also joined. Pringle said the Trump administration was perpetuating “the greatest assault on public education that we’ve ever seen in this country”.Democrats and independents have added a new degree of physicality to their opposition to the Trump agenda. Earlier this month, Booker set a new record for the chamber’s longest speech when he held the floor, without a bathroom break, for more than 25 hours.Booker said he was doing so with the “intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States senate for as long as I am physically able” in order to protest the actions of Trump and his administration.The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an independent, and the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been on a “Fighting Oligarchy” nationwide tour of the US to protest the “oligarchs and corporate interests that have so much power and influence in this country”.On Sunday, Sanders, who has accused Democrats of significantly ignoring working-class priorities, said that the party does not have “a vision for the future”.“You have Democrats appropriately, and I’m working with them, talking about Trump’s movement toward authoritarianism, vigorously opposing the so-called reconciliation bill to give over a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1% and make massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition and housing, opposing what Musk is doing to dismember the Social Security Administration and the Veterans Administration, making it hard for our veterans to get decent healthcare or benefits on time,” Sanders told NBC’s Meet the Press.Throughout Sunday’s livestreamed sit-in, groups of curious passersby also found themselves sitting on the Capitol steps listening and weighing in on the discussion. More

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      Republican unity to be tested in talks over Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

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      Donald Trump has made a simple request of Congress’s Republican leaders: deliver “one big, beautiful bill” that will turn his campaign promises into reality. By all indications, there will be little beautiful about the negotiations to come when Congress returns to session on Monday.The bill envisioned by the president will extend tax cuts enacted during his first term, fund more border defenses and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and potentially include the president’s vow to end the taxation of tips, overtime and social security payments. To pay for it, the GOP is eyeing dramatic reductions in government spending, and has targeted social safety net programs relied on by tens of millions of Americans.But even with the cuts, experts say this could be one of the steepest increases to the federal deficit in recent US history.That prospect has tested the resolve of Congress’s Republican majorities, which are relatively small – three seats in the Senate and House of Representatives each. While many lawmakers insist that government spending must be reined in to manage the United State’s budget deficit at a time of high borrowing costs, small groups of lawmakers have already registered their opposition to dismantling programs they say help their constituents.Earlier this month Republicans muscled through the budget framework for the bill, an important step that outlines how much they will spend and cut, and allows them to circumvent Democratic opposition in the Senate. But though party leaders described it as a sign of unity, experts say the plan instead illustrated just how divided the GOP is. The resolution gives the House and Senate separate targets for savings and expenditures – differences that would usually be resolved before passage.“The budget resolution that they adopted is unique, I would say, somewhat unprecedented,” said Bill Hoagland, a former top budget adviser to Republican senators who is now a senior vice-president at the Bipartisan Policy Center thinktank.“What they’ve done here is keep the ball moving by kicking the can further down the road and leaving unsettled a number of differences, particularly on the spending side.”Just how riven the party is will become clear in the weeks to come, after Congress returns and Republicans set to work crafting the bill amid an economy made newly precarious by Trump’s on-again, off-again approach to tariff policy. Party leaders have cast the bill as a way to make good on Trump’s promise of a “golden age” in American, fueled by smaller, deregulated government.“Our aim is to deliver on our promises in this big, beautiful bill regarding things like border security, restoring peace through strength, and American energy dominance and regulatory reform, to get the economy really humming again,” House speaker Mike Johnson said earlier this month.The speaker and his Senate counterpart, majority leader John Thune, say they intend for the bill to reduce government spending by at least $1.5tn, and make permanent the tax cuts that analyses found mostly benefited the rich after their enactment in 2017.But the budget framework’s instructions to the Senate target a mere $4bn in spending cuts, while assuming the tax cuts are “current policy” and therefore cost nothing, to the chagrin of many economists. The House plan acknowledges that extending the tax cuts will cost trillions of dollars, and proposes dramatic funding cuts elsewhere.Its instructions indicate that Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor and disabled Americans, could lose around $800b in funding, which would be its largest cut in history. Republicans have additionally signaled a willingness to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Snap, while the climate-change fighting Inflation Reduction Act passed under Joe Biden could be slashed.Both chambers also intend to couple the bill with an increase in the US government’s debt limit. The congressional budget office estimates the limit will be hit in August or September, after which the government will be unable to borrow to pay its obligations, potentially sparking a financial crisis.The resulting bill could cost as much as $5.8tn for the next 10 years, a huge amount that Maya MacGuineas, the president of the spending wary Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, described as “the largest deficit increase in history” and “an absolute disgrace”.So big is the spending plan that Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Republican George W Bush, warned that extending the tax cuts alone would likely crowd out the other policies Trump campaigned on, such as ending the taxation on tips and other income.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a very unambitious piece of tax legislation, from an economic policy point of view. It doesn’t really do much and, and I don’t think there’s any real will collectively to do big spending cuts, and they’ve taken off limits the places where that you really do need to reform,” Holtz-Eakin said, referring to social security and Medicare. Both programs are big drivers of the budget deficit, but Trump and the Republicans say they oppose cutting them.Finding an agreement on the bill is expected to be a major lift for Republican leaders in Congress, particularly since the tiny House majority could empower small groups of lawmakers to hold up the bill.Already, a dozen Republicans have publicly said they will not support legislation that reduces Medicaid coverage “for vulnerable populations” and 21 others have argued against repealing clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, are expected to stand against any bill that does not sufficiently reduce spending.“When you want to cut $1.5tn, you’re going to get to a lot of programs that people rely on. And when that happens, they’re going to start to hear about it,” Joe Morelle, the No 2 Democrat on the spending-focused House appropriations committee, told the Guardian.He predicted that no Democrats would vote for the forthcoming bill, meaning that Johnson and Thune will be left to get it through their chambers with their party’s votes alone.Trump has attempted to corral Congress by threatening to support challengers to Republicans who don’t vote his way. But with the GOP taking aim at safety net programs popular in their own districts, Morelle said many lawmakers will have to weigh facing the president’s wrath against losing re-election.“Who do they fear more? The retribution of an angry president, or do they fear the retribution of voters who are going to say, sorry, without healthcare, I’m not voting for you?” Morelle said. More

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      The Republican anti-tax coalition is beginning to disintegrate | David Sirota, Arjun Singh, Ariella Markowitz and Natalie Bettendorf

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      “I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice – I know that there are some people in this room who don’t believe that my marriage should have been legal,” the rightwing impresario Bari Weiss told a Federalist Society gathering in 2023. “And that’s OK. Because we’re all Americans who want lower taxes.”The assembled conservatives guffawed at hearing the quiet part out loud: in this case, the admission that tax cuts for the rich have been the glue holding the US conservative movement together.And yet, less than two years after Weiss’s speech, the epoxy seems to be less sticky.In recent weeks, polls have shown Republican voters becoming far more skeptical of across-the-board tax reduction proposals. Reflecting that shift, GOP lawmakers are now trial-ballooning a proposal to increase some taxes on the wealthy. Some Maga voices are attempting to articulate a Republican-leaning, tax-cut version of Democrats’ traditional redistributionist rhetoric, arguing that higher taxes on millionaires should finance bigger tax cuts for the working class.All of this has the Washington swamp’s old-guard Republicans in a panic; one longtime anti-tax leader insisted that “there are traitors inside the Trump White House,” and another declared: “This is a potential crisis in the party – it sounds like Bernie Sanders economics.”So what happened? Why is the anti-tax argument losing its unifying power among Republicans?As the Lever’s new investigative audio series Tax Revolt details, the answer may lie in that movement’s key revelation a half-century ago.The Santa Claus theory of tax cutsIn the mid-1970s, the Republican party was adrift, demoralized and divided amid both the post-Watergate backlash and the Republican president Gerald Ford’s attempt to raise taxes in pursuit of halting inflation and plugging federal budget holes. A young journalist named Jude Wanniski had an epiphany when at a lunch meeting, he watched the economist Arthur Laffer draw a curve on a napkin to argue to the Ford staffers Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld that cutting taxes could raise companies’ revenues.Two years later, Wanniski penned a grand unifying “Santa Claus Theory”, arguing that Republicans had “continued to play Scrooge, carping against increased spending without ever offering the obvious alternative”: tax reduction.He concluded: “Republicans, traditionally the party of income growth, should be the Santa Claus of tax reduction,” offering it as a supposed gift to Americans – and understand that “the first rule of successful politics is Never Shoot Santa Claus.”It was a revelation for a new generation of conservatives seeking to create a sunnier, more optimistic image for the GOP in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s cranky campaign and Richard Nixon’s downfall. Younger, more telegenic Republican leaders such as Representative Jack Kemp passed the essay around to colleagues, urging them to reimagine tax cuts not solely as a means to demonize government, but also as a way to court the working class with promises of life-bettering benefits.The dual message of so-called “supply-side economics” soon found its Santa Claus in the anti-tax governor turned anti-tax president Ronald Reagan.“As government’s hunger for ever more revenues expanded, families saw taxes cut deeper and deeper into their paychecks,” Reagan said before signing federal legislation to cut the top marginal tax rate. “This tax bill is less a reform than a revolution. Millions of working poor will be dropped from the tax rolls altogether, and families will get a long-overdue break with lower rates.”High-income tax cuts became the Republican party’s economic policy priority – and depicting such gifts to the wealthy as a boon to the working class became the GOP’s political strategy. Indeed, Reagan, George W Bush and Donald Trump each championed tax cut legislation that delivered disproportionate benefits to the rich, and fueled an explosion of economic inequality – all while presenting their agenda as fight-for-the-little-guy populism.“I promised we would pass a massive tax cut for the everyday, working American families who are the backbone and the heartbeat of our country,” Trump said on the eve of signing his $1.9tn tax cut bill in 2017. “We’re just days away [from] keeping that promise and delivering a truly amazing victory for American families. We want to give you, the American people, a giant tax cut for Christmas.”This sales pitch became ubiquitous, and most political prognosticators assumed it would always be effective. But survey data suggests that most Americans have come to realize that while Tax Cut Santa Claus has been stashing big gifts under billionaires’ Christmas trees, he’s been leaving everyone else’s stockings empty.Whereas more than half of Americans approved of Reagan’s first major high-income tax cut proposal, only about a third of Americans approved of Bush’s similar tax proposal at the same time in his presidency. By the time Trump assumed office for his first term, less than a third of Americans supported his high-income tax cut initiative, knowing that such policies have failed to benefit them personally and failed to boost the macroeconomy.‘The times are totally different’Fast forward to Trump’s second term. In previous eras, a new Republican president delivering more tax cuts for the wealthy would be a foregone conclusion under Wanniski’s Santa Claus theory. But that political hypothesis is now buckling under the weight of Trump’s new $4.5tn proposal to extend his 2017 tax cuts.In its current form, the White House’s initiative would deliver more than half its benefits to the richest 10% of the country. Coupled with spending cuts and tariffs, Trump’s agenda would deliver a big income boost to the top 1%, while reducing the income of the bottom 80%, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.As Trump’s legislative agenda hits Congress, opposition to more high-income tax cuts is strong not just among Democrats and independents, but also among Republicans. Morning Consult reports that 70% of GOP voters believe “the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes” – a whopping eight-point jump from six years ago. Moreover, “roughly 7 in 10 voters, including 2 in 3 Republicans, support proposals to raise taxes on earners making more than $400,000.”Republican leaders are responding with the previously unthinkable: proposals to raise some taxes on the rich. Indeed, Trump reportedly floated the idea and some GOP lawmakers are considering creating a new top tax bracket.This has touched off an intraparty civil war. On one side are those who came of age in the Reagan and George W Bush epochs – Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, the former vice-president Mike Pence, Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, the hedge-funder-turned-GOP senator Dave McCormick, and the Club for Growth’s Stephen Moore. This old guard believes Republicans can still get away with depicting billionaire giveaways as populism, and vilifying tax hikes on the rich.“It’s vicious and full of envy. It’s a dumb idea. It’s bad for the economy,” said Norquist, who spent the last quarter-century pressing Republicans to sign pledges to oppose all tax increases. “What happened when George Herbert Walker Bush raised the top rate? Let’s see, he lost the next election. We lost House and Senate seats and taxes went up and we had a recession.”On the other side are newfangled Maga voices – the former Mitt Romney staffer Oren Cass, Vice-President JD Vance, the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and reportedly Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought. They sense political peril in Republicans presenting themselves as populists while their party enriches billionaires and corporations.“We have to increase taxes on the wealthy,” Bannon said in December. This month he added that conservatives must prove “Republicans are not the country club Republicans”, which is “why it’s so important to not extend the tax cuts for the wealthy”.Of the old anti-tax crowd, Bannon added: “They’re arrogant and they refuse to look at the reality of the situation we’re in … The times are totally different.”‘Didn’t we already give them a break at the top?’Of course, we’ve been at these junctures before – moments when Republicans seemed to sense political vulnerability on taxes.In 1985, Reagan tried to deflect Democrats’ criticism of his tax policy by insisting: “There is one group of losers in our tax plan – those individuals and corporations who are not paying their fair share or, for that matter, any share. These abuses cannot be tolerated.”Similarly, George W Bush momentarily pushed back against conservative aides pressing him to champion yet another tax cut for the rich. “Didn’t we already give them a break at the top?” he reportedly asked.But the powerful anti-tax movement of those eras convinced both Republican presidents to plow forward. Reagan followed up his first tax cut by further reducing the top tax rate, and Bush’s sequel to his first tax cut was slashing taxes on corporate dividends.Trump could end up doing much the same. After all, ramming more tax cuts for the rich through Congress is the surest way for Trump to enrich himself, his family and the entire front row of his inauguration.But this time around, the long-term politics of taxes are in flux. Running the same tax play would show a Republican president siding with oligarchs against the preferences of his own party’s rank and file that no longer buys the Santa Claus theory.That’s a new and unpredictable dynamic – one that may finally begin weakening the anti-tax movement’s grip on power in the years ahead.

      David Sirota is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Lever, an investigative news outlet. Arjun Singh, Ariella Markowitz and Natalie Bettendorf are producers of the outlet’s weekly podcast Lever Time, which is releasing a new miniseries Tax Revolt, on the 50-year history of the anti-tax movement now culminating in the Trump tax cuts. More