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      Republicans are dodging fired federal staff: ‘They will not even look in our direction’

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      Workers hit by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts of federal government jobs, programs and services turned to congressional Republicans for help. But Republicans don’t want to talk about it, according to people who have tried to reach the politicians.Sabrina Valenti, a former budget analyst for the Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), was fired in February, then reinstated, and fired again weeks later.She started contacting Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives to express concern. “They represent hundreds of thousands or millions of people and those people deserve a safe and healthy life,” said Valenti. “They are allowing the people who create that safe and healthy life to be fired.”But as she worked with other fired federal workers in the Fork Off Coalition to reach members of Congress, the responses ranged “from indifference and being ignored to outright hostility”, Valenti claimed.Senators Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley “just will not even look in our direction” in the hallways, she said. Hawley and Grassley’s offices did not respond to requests for comment.The House of Representatives narrowly passed Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill on Thursday, which would extend tax cuts for individuals and corporations; sunset clean energy incentives enacted under Joe Biden; relieve taxes on tips, overtime and car loan interest; and fund construction of a wall along the border with Mexico, and facilities for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.To offset its costs, the GOP has approved funding cuts and new work requirements for Medicaid, which provides healthcare for poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Snap, which provides food benefits to low-income families. Analysts fear these changes will bar millions from these benefits.Jeanne Weaver worked as an aide for 35 years at the Ebensburg Center in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, one of two state-operated facilities for adults with intellectual disabilities, and is worried about the facility’s future .But when Weaver, now president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Retiree Chapter 13, tried to reach her representative in Congress, the Republican John Joyce, she had no luck. Even when she traveled to Washington, she was unable to get a meeting.View image in fullscreen“I’ve called, I’ve left him messages,” Weaver told the Guardian. “If he votes for cuts for Medicaid, I will make sure everyone knows him, because they don’t know him now. He’s hiding out, not doing what his constituents want him to do.”After the Guardian went to Joyce for comment, Weaver heard from a member of his staff. His office declined to comment. On Sunday, after House Republicans advanced Trump’s tax cut and spending package out of a key committee, Joyce claimed the legislation would “strengthen, secure, and preserve” Medicaid for “future generations of Americans who need and deserve these benefits”.John Kennedy, senator for Louisiana, did speak with Valenti – a graduate of Louisiana State University – about her program at Noaa, and its impact on Louisiana’s coast.“He seemed really certain that if there was any, if any mistakes were made in the past, that they would be able to go back and reverse them,” Valenti said. Kennedy’s office did not respond to requests for comment.Other workers reliant on federal funds that have been cut, or are facing cuts, have also been pressuring their elected officials to address their worries.Jesse Martinez, a teacher and co-president of the La Crosse Education Association in La Crosse, Wisconsin, expressed concern about cuts to education, Medicaid and Snap benefits to staff working for the Republican representative Derrick Van Orden.The staff claimed Van Orden would not vote for cuts to Medicaid or Snap benefits, according to Martinez – but he voted for a budget blueprint that included cuts.“In the school district of La Crosse, we receive approximately $500,000 per year in Medicaid funding. We use that to pay for speech and language pathologists in our schools, occupational and physical therapists across the district and school nurses in our schools,” said Martinez. “Losing that funding would be devastating to our kids.”Van Orden argued in a statement that “being fiscally responsible and protecting benefits for vulnerable Americans can exist in the same universe”, and a spokesperson for Van Orden denied the budget bill cuts Medicaid.Stephanie Teachman, an administrative assistant at the State University of New York at Fredonia, and president of Suny Fredonia Local 607, an affiliate union of AFSCME, fears that cuts could threaten the future of the only hospital in her rural area, Brooks Memorial, and the university, which is one of the largest employers in the area.But attempts to speak with her congressional representative, the Republican representative Nick Langworthy, have not elicited any responses, she said.“I’ve been to Langworthy’s office and he’s never there. We’ve written letters to him, and he doesn’t respond,” she added. “All of us deserve to have a voice and be heard. It’s unfortunate the people we vote for aren’t listening to us and they don’t seem to care what people of their districts are up to or what life is like for us.”View image in fullscreenA spokesperson for Langworthy claimed his office did not hear from Teachman until a few hours before a debate on the budget bill. “Not one penny is being cut from eligible Americans who rely on Medicaid,” the spokesperson claimed in an email, accusing Democrats of “dishonest fearmongering”.In Washington, those urging Republicans to resist cuts to key services have struggled to make headway. Senator Bill Cassidy’s office “kicked us out”, said Valenti, who noted the senator Katie Britt of Alabama called Capitol police on some fired federal workers, and that the Indiana Republican senator Jim Banks called a fired health and human services worker, Mack Schroeder, a “clown” who “probably deserved it”.Senators Britt, Cassidy and Banks’s respective offices did not respond to requests for comment. Senator Banks declined to apologize for his remarks following the incident and said he “won’t back down”.Four of the largest public sector unions in the US – AFSCME, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Service Employees International Union, collectively representing 8.3 million workers – have launched a new campaign to target GOP representatives over the cuts.The drive includes a $2m ad campaign across 18 congressional districts held by Republicans, including in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Arizona.“Their goal is the gutting of the schools and hospitals that help working Americans have a shot at a better life. And for what? To pay for tax cuts for billionaires,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT. “These ads send a message to Congress about the human toll of the administration’s attacks.” 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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      Trump can complain all he wants – but he can’t stop his own economic mess | Sidney Blumenthal

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      With his usual threats, Donald Trump is trying to ward off the dire reality that he has created and is bearing down on him. He can clamp migrants in foreign gulags, coerce white-shoe law firms into becoming his pro bono serfs and try to simply erase the National Endowment for the Humanities, but he can’t rescind his harm to the economy. Trump can slash the National Weather Service, but he can’t stop the storm he’s whipped up. He’s shouting into the wind at his twister.No matter how much he might lower his draconian tariffs after his 90-day breathing spell, the velocity of damage is just building. It’s not a mistake that can be rectified. There’s no do-over. It’s not a golf game at one of his clubs where he gets endless mulligans and is declared the champion. Nor does Trump really want to draw back completely from his tariffs as if he never had proudly displayed his “Liberation Day” idiot board.When the Walmart CEO inevitably announced that prices would have to be raised as a result of Trump’s tariffs, Trump warned: “Between Walmart and China they should, as is said ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!”Trump has falsely insisted that tariffs are levied on foreign importers. But Walmart demonstrated the indisputable fact that tariffs are price increases passed on to consumers. They are a tax. Trump is furious at the early indication of the renewed inflation and price rises that are coming. His natural response, of course, is an attempt at intimidation.The tariffs are a shakedown by which Trump could exercise his control over corporations that must scrape and bow before him, asking for targeted relief in exchange for, perhaps, payments to his personal political action committee, or, perhaps, throwing money into the kitty of his various financial endeavors, his crypto firm and meme-coin scheme. According to his wishful thinking, businesses should “eat the tariffs” to cover up his falsehood and maintain his popularity. For his sake, shut up and “eat” it. Trump is at war with the corporations’ bottom line.He can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but he can’t fool the bond market any of the time. When Moody’s Ratings downgraded the US credit rating, the Trump White House put out a statement attacking Moody’s “credibility” while blaming “Biden’s mess”. Moody’s reasons were an oblique criticism of Trump’s pending “big, beautiful bill” for massive regressive tax cuts in addition to his tariffs, which have led to the suspension of any further cuts in interest rates from the Federal Reserve.Blaming Biden, in any case, hasn’t been cutting it with public opinion. Only 21% of Americans attributed the state of the economy to Biden’s policies in a poll in early April conducted by CBS News/YouGov. In Trump’s first hundred days alone, he denigrated Biden at least 580 times, according to NBC News. Trump sought to make him the scapegoat for his own policies. But the public is certain that Trump and nobody else owns the economy as he desperately tries to restore it to where Biden bequeathed it to him, with inflation and interest rates falling. And, now, very ill, Biden can no longer serve as a convenient target.Even if, after Trump’s 90-day pause on tariffs, he cuts them in half, the result will be devastating to small businesses, family farms and many large corporations. Nearly 90% of American small businesses rely on imported goods. More than 20% of the US agricultural sector depends upon exporting its products, according to the US Department of Agriculture. US manufacturers rely on imports for more than 20% of machinery, products and components. More than 41m American jobs are linked to imports and exports, one in five, according to the Business Roundtable. That does not include the multiplier effect of millions, if not tens of millions, of additional jobs created as a result.The supply chain has been severely distorted. For 12 hours on 9 May, zero cargo ships – none, not one – departed from China to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two major US ports for Asian imported goods. The more than $906bn trucking industry, which had finally regained stability after the Covid disruption, faces another shock. “Trump trade war is wrecking hope for 2025 US trucking rebound,” reads the headline on a Reuters story.The uncertainty factor that Trump has introduced has frozen all planning. The auto companies, among others, have given up issuing any guidance to investors. Their earnings are plunging, their suppliers in chaos. Nobody can predictably produce, order or hire, and so businesses are in a state of suspension. The prospect of a slowdown has already depressed oil prices to the point where it will soon not be profitable to drill at all. In April, Trump called critics of his tariffs “scoundrels and frauds”, but retailers do not know how to price goods, how much to raise them to sustain often razor-thin profit margins. They face a Hobson’s choice of pricing themselves out of their markets or absorbing the costs and going bust.The head of Trump’s council of economic advisers, Kevin Hassett, cheerfully announced on 12 April that he expected the gross domestic product to grow by 2% to 2.5% in the first quarter of this year. On 30 April, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that GDP had fallen by 0.3% in the quarter.Even after Trump agreed to drop his 145% tariff on China to 30%, Paul Krugman points out that “we’re still looking at a shock to the economy seven or eight times as big as Smoot-Hawley, the previous poster child for destructive tariff policy”. Krugman states that on the optimistic lower end, “we’d expect Trump’s tariffs after last weekend’s retreat on China to cut overall US trade by roughly 50%. Trade with China, which would have been virtually eliminated with a 145% tariff rate, would fall by ‘only’ around 65% with a 30% tariff.”The result will be devastating, with rising inflation, higher unemployment, shortages, and lower growth and investment. In short, the economy will plunge into stagflation for the first time since the 1970s. Then, the phenomenon was the outcome of the Opec oil shock. This is the Trump shock, not the consequence of an external factor, but entirely self-induced through a delusion. Does he care? “Well,” Trump said, “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”All of what’s coming was foreseeable. This is not a case in which unintended consequences suddenly emerged without advance warning, like in the 1970s. Here the red lights flashed; Trump raced through them.The uncertainty he’s injected is not a byproduct of happenstance. Uncertainty is the aspiring dictator’s pre-eminent prerogative. Trump resents any limitation on his ability to act however he wishes. The ultimate privilege of a dictator is to be at liberty to be impulsive. The more unpredictable he is, the more he is regarded as omnipotent.Trump has no real policies. There is no actual analysis, no expertise, no peer review. He brandishes atavistic symbols as primitive representations of his unrestrained power. Lowering or raising the tariffs are functionally equivalent if they are perceived as enhancing the perception of his potency. The merits are of no interest. Policies, such as they are, are measured by how well they gild his lily. The more unpredictable he is, the more he thinks of himself and thinks others think of him as almighty.For Trump, experience is meaningless. He never learns. Even his existential moments are forgotten, like his near-death from Covid. He deduces no lessons. It doesn’t inform his health policies, for example, which he’s turned over to oddballs and snake-oil salesmen led by the chief crank with roadkill in his freezer and a worm in his brain, Robert F Kennedy Jr.Trump’s learning curve is a hamster’s wheel. He goes ’round and ’round, repeating belligerent ignorance unaltered over decades. He’s the hamster who thinks he’s making progress if he receives attention. His solipsism is epistemological. Jared Kushner grasped its essence when he surfed on Amazon to find the one discredited economist, Peter Navarro, to provide sham formulas to justify Trump’s preconceived tariff obsession.Trump’s psychological equilibrium requires the constant rejection of his responsibility for the abrasive reality he churns up. Confronting reality exacts fortitude, both politically and intellectually. He considers that a mug’s game he must resist. His inner fragility is shielded by projecting images of muscular strength, now AI generated videos and pictures of himself produced by the White House communications team as a Jedi, a guitar hero (after Bruce Springsteen called him “treasonous”) and the Pope (the new Pope Leo XIV does not much care for the social Darwinism of JD Vance).Meanwhile, there must be a conspiracy theory to deliver up a scapegoat. That opens the door of the Oval Office for malicious fabulists to whom Trump is particularly susceptible and finds useful as his instruments to terrorize even his own staff. Enter loony Laura Loomer as his virtual national security personnel director with a portfolio in hand identifying six officials on the national security council to be purged, soon to be followed by the defenestration of the national security adviser Michael Waltz, who, rather than the thoroughly incompetent secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, served as the scapegoat for the Signal chat group that invited in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic.A 9/11 truther, Loomer claimed the terrorist attack was “an inside job.” During the 2024 campaign, Trump brought her to the 9/11 memorial service. Loomer said that if Kamala Harris won the White House it “will smell of curry”. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right member of the House from Georgia, assailed Loomer as an “appalling and extremist racist”. “You don’t want to be Loomered,” Trump said. “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career in a sense. Thanks, Laura.”Trump famously can’t accept the slightest criticism. He is armored against learning in any case. He is incapable of engaging in any self-examination for both emotional and cognitive reasons. It would be too upsetting even to contemplate. His whole being would become paralyzed if he were ever to suffer a bout of introspection. His system couldn’t tolerate it. His brittle peace of mind requires his fabricated self-image to be constantly apple-polished and worshipped.The split between Trump’s anxious need for his cosseted appearance and the terrible reality he’s making is his ultimate credibility gap. He must sustain a completely self-contained inner world or the walls start to close in.Information must therefore be suppressed. When the intelligence community assesses that the Tren de Aragua gang is not being manipulated by the Maduro regime of Venezuela, which is the invented excuse for Trump’s migrant round-up emergency, then fire the intelligence analysts or tell them to redo their report.When the Democrats in the House attempted to bring up a bill to remove Trump’s claim of a national security emergency for his tariffs – another mythical emergency – Republicans moved to block it in the rules committee. No vote, no debate. It’s a disappearing act.If the lying doesn’t work, try intimidation. That is the rhyme or reason behind Trump’s success in imposing his malignancy. But now he’s created a reality he can’t disguise or bully. The planets are hurdling into collision. He’s done it to himself by himself.The passage of his “Big Beautiful Bill”, with its extravagant tax cuts for the wealthy and deep cuts to Medicaid, wounding his white rural base, of which, depending on the county, are 25% to 40% dependent on the federal healthcare program, will spike the inflationary effect of his tariffs as well as the deficit. Republicans no longer uphold the pretense that their tax cut redistribution of wealth upward will actually lower the deficit by reducing revenue. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics claims, originally dubbed voodoo economics by George HW Bush, in fact proved Bush prescient. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, confessed that the supply side charade was a “Trojan horse” for lowering the upper rate and was just a “horse-and-sparrow” theory of “trickle down.” Thus, Trump’s potential legislative success will only deepen his crisis.Donald turns his lonely eyes to the Federal Reserve to bail him out, like his father, Fred Trump, who always arrived in the nick of time to rescue him from his messes. Trump lies in capital letters: “THE CONSENSUS OF ALMOST EVERYBODY IS THAT, ‘THE FED SHOULD CUT RATES SOONER, RATHER THAN LATER.” There is no such consensus. The consensus is to the contrary.Trump’s begging shifts to threats. If Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, doesn’t do what Trump says he will be turned into the scapegoat: “Too Late Powell, a man legendary for being Too Late, will probably blow it again – But who knows???”But Powell is imperturbable. “Higher real rates may also reflect the possibility that inflation could be more volatile going forward than in the inter-crisis period of the 2010s,” he said in his most measured tone on 15 May. “We may be entering a period of more frequent, and potentially more persistent, supply shocks – a difficult challenge for the economy and for central banks.”It’s not Powell who is “too late.” It’s Trump. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in his novel Decline and Fall: “Too late, old boy, too late. The saddest words in the English language.”

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth 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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      Trump health cuts create ‘real danger’ around disease outbreaks, workers warn

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      Mass terminations and billions of dollars’ worth of cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have gutted key programs – from child support services to HIV treatment abroad – and created a “real danger” that disease outbreaks will be missed, according to former workers.Workers at the HHS, now led by Robert F Kennedy Jr, and in public health warned in interviews that chaotic, flawed and sweeping reductions would have broad, negative effects across the US and beyond.While Donald Trump’s administration is cutting the HHS workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 through firings and buyouts, grant cuts by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have also had a stark impact on state governments – and resulted in firings at state public health agencies.At the South Carolina department of public health, for example, more than 70 staff were laid off in March due to funding cuts.“Disease surveillance is how we know when something unusual is happening with people’s health, like when there are more food-poisoning cases than usual, or a virus starts spreading in a community,” an epidemiologist at the department, whose role was eliminated, said. “It’s the system that lets us spot patterns, find outbreaks early, and respond before more people get sick.”“When you lose public health staff, you lose time, you lose accuracy, you lose responsiveness, and ultimately that affects people’s health,” they added. “Without us, outbreaks can fly under the radar, and the response can be delayed or disorganized. That’s the real danger when these roles get cut.View image in fullscreen“It’s invisible work, until it’s not. You may not think about it day to day, but it’s protecting your drinking water, your food, your kids’ schools and your community.”A spokesperson for South Carolina’s public health department declined to comment on specifics, but noted employees hired through grants are temporary. “When funding for grants is no longer available, their employment may end, as happened with some temporary grant employees who were funded by these grants,” they said.In Washington, the HHS has been cut harder by Doge than any other federal department. Hundreds of grants to state, local and tribal governments, as well as to research institutions, have been eliminated, worth over $6.8bn in unpaid obligations.The HHS receives about a quarter of all federal spending, with the majority disbursed to states for health programs and services such as Medicare and Medicaid, the insurance programs; medical research; and food and drug safety. Trump’s budget proposal calls for cutting the department’s discretionary spending by 26.2%, or $33.3bn.RFK Jr, who has a history of promoting conspiracy theories and medical misinformation, was nominated by Trump and approved by the Senate along party lines, with Mitch McConnell the sole Republican dissenter.Following a reduction in force of 10,000 employees on 1 April, Kennedy Jr claimed 20% of the firings were in error and that those workers would be reinstated, though that has not happened.An HHS spokesperson blamed any such errors on data-collection issues, and did not comment on any other aspects of the Guardian’s reporting.Aids relief program ‘dismantled’At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an operating division of the HHS, employees working on maternal and child health at the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) program were shocked to be included in the reduction in force, as earlier in the administration their work had received a waiver for parts of the program from federal funding freezes.All federal experts on HIV prevention in children overseas were fired as part of the reduction in force.“Our concern initially was that it was a mistake with the name. We hoped around that time it came out that there were 20% errors, that we would be included,” said an epidemiologist who was included in the reduction in force, but requested to remain anonymous as they are currently on administrative leave. They also noted that they were in the middle of planning and delivering a new pediatric HIV treatment medication set to be dispersed this year, and that that work was now at risk.View image in fullscreenThey said 22 epidemiologists in the branch of their CDC division had been fired. Pepfar was created in 2003 by George W Bush to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission and credited with saving 26 million lives.“We were very shocked on April 1 that we were put immediately on admin leave,” said another epidemiologist affected by the reduction in force at the CDC. “We really feel our branch being cut was a mistake. The state department had said services were a priority and needed to continue, but then we were cut by HHS.”They noted HIV treatment had already stopped in regions of countries that had been reliant on USAID programs, such as Zambia.“It is one of the most successful global health programs in history, data driven with high levels of accountability and the dollars spent achieve impact. Our concern now is, yes, they are continuing Pepfar in name, but they are dismantling all the systems and structure that allowed it to succeed,” they added. “The US made a huge investment in this program in 20 years and a lot of it is now undone. We’ve now disrupted those systems that could have reduced and eventually removed US investment in these programs.”‘Long-term impact’ on US familiesInside the HHS, the Administration for Children and Families is responsible for enforcing court-ordered child-support payments. For every dollar it receives in federal funding, ACF says it is able to collect $5 in child support.A child-support specialist with the HHS, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said reductions in force at the department have increased workloads on those who were not fired by multiple times, making it so state and tribal agencies have no way of ensuring they are compliant with federal requirements.“The regional staff with direct oversight of the program are gone,” they said. “There are entire regions that have two staff members managing a quarter of the work for the program with no management, no support, no knowledge of the program.”After the Trump administration took office, the agency was under an unofficial stop-work order, where staff were not permitted to provide guidance or support to grantees or even answer phones, until late February, the specialist said. A reduction in force followed on 1 April, when, the child-support specialist claimed, about half the ACF staff working on child support were fired.Their department is responsible for overseeing child-support programs at state, tribal and local levels. States “could very well lose millions of dollars in funding” if ACF does not provide key training and assistance and the states do not have qualified staff, the specialist cautioned. “And that is the long-term impact to vulnerable children and families in the country.”They added: “The entire function of the program is to give economic stability to children and families, so that they do not depend on any other government program, or their reliance on these programs is lower, because the children are supported by both parents.”‘A living hell’At the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also within the HHS, one of 300 workers terminated as part of a reduction in force claimed it had been illegal, and had not followed any proper procedures. The National Treasury Employees Union has filed a grievance over how the firings were carried out, including incorrect information on notices.They explained that, on 1 April, they received a generic letter informing them of an intent of reduction in force. Hours later, they were locked out of their government logins. “We started emailing the management that was left, trying to get clarification on what our status was. Nobody could give us an answer,” the worker said.On 7 April, they discovered through their paystub that they had been placed on administrative leave, despite never receiving a notice. They didn’t receive an RIF notice until weeks later, after requesting it.“Based on my tenure, and as a disabled veteran, I should at least have a chance of reassignment,” they said. “I’m not mad about losing my job. It happens. I’ve been laid off. The first time was in the private sector, and it was way more humane, more empathetic, and I was given different offers.“This, on the other hand, is unbridled hate. This administration has gone out of their way to make it a living hell for all of its public servants.” More

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      Protecting democracy is not enough: five things Americans must fight for | Huck Gutman

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      A recent dinner was peaceable until it was just about over, when a friend’s son spoke up in praise of a middle-of-the-road columnist and how his opposition to Donald Trump’s attack on democracy revealed that we were all on the progressive left now.“Not true,” I responded with more vehemence than I expected. “Wanting democratic norms is not sufficient; it is merely a precondition for meaningful change.” Making sure the US’s plumbing was secure did not mean that anything of importance would pass through the pipes.There has been a great outcry about the erosion of democratic practices during these first hundred days of the second Trump presidency. Many Americans, probably a solid majority, are appalled at the attack on our courts and judges, at the willful ignoring of habeas corpus, at the intrusion of unelected figures – not just Elon Musk, but his whole “department of government efficiency” (Doge) team – into the privacy of American lives, at the undoing of the independence of agencies intended to protect the public.But protecting democracy is not enough. It is a rearguard action, one that fights against incursions that would transform the United States into an oligarchic state serving special interests. It does not address the needs of the larger public. Fighting for procedures and not substance is insufficient.Those who fight for the future of our nation need to fight not just against threats, but for a just and equitable future. Too often the well-deserved plaudits for those who fight against do not extend to articulating a program of what the American nation needs, in addition to democratic institutions.Here are five specific suggestions for what we should be fighting for. Without these reforms, defenses of democracy ring hollow, elevating a defense of form while denying any attention to substance.First, the nation needs a new minimum wage, a living wage, not the residue of 1938 legislation called the Fair Labor Standards Act. No one can live on $7.25 an hour, which translates to about $15,000 a year.Second, Americans deserve healthcare as a right. A Medicare for All system would extend healthcare to every person. Its cost would be more than offset by eliminating the 25% of healthcare spending that goes for overhead in our private-insurance-dominated system. Cutting $1tn of needless bureaucratic expenses and bill-keeping would ensure that we have the money to provide healthcare to everyone.Third, Americans should find it easy to join unions if they wish. The decline in unionization is a major reason why, as the wealthy get ever wealthier, wages have been flat or declining for almost 50 years. As it stands, the table is tilted toward management. Corporations regulate all employee concerns, from wages to healthcare to retirement benefits, leaving workers little to no chance to say what they actually want. We must level that playing field so that workers together can fight for their needs.Fourth, we need to increase taxes on the wealthy. There is no reason that Warren Buffett, as he has said, should pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. Increasing the marginal tax rate for the highest earners, limiting the exorbitant pass-throughs of the inheritance tax, and ending the unhealthy practice of taxing paper gains in wealth, or capital gains, less than the money earned by workers would diminish the federal deficit and at the same time fund many needed services to Americans. Removing the cap on income subject to social security taxes would ensure the solvency of the nation’s pension program for generations.Fifth, we should reverse the deeply damaging Citizens United decision, which enabled the wealthy and their special interests to buy elections. Currently, money and not votes determines the priorities of the United States. If the supreme court does not reverse this decision, a constitutional amendment limiting contributions – one person, one vote, with a low limit on individual contributions and no contributions by corporations – would fix this loophole, which has corrupted all of American politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere is, rightly, much concern about the undemocratic moves made by the Trump administration. But unless we demand changes in what the United States does, unless we do more than just defending the practices of democracy, our society will remain dysfunctional. Those who focus only on the process of maintaining the pipes required for quenching our thirst, without giving us actual water to drink, are fighting only a small part of the battle.What’s giving me hope nowWe need to fight for democracy, but we also need to fight for the achievable goals democracy can bring us, particularly economic justice for all Americans. Raising wages, providing healthcare to all, fostering unions, taxing the wealthy and corporations, preventing big money from buying elections: these are the things the renewal of democracy can and should bring us.

      Huck Gutman is a former chief of staff to Senator Bernie Sanders and an emeritus professor at the University of Vermont More

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      Why is Trump considering raising taxes on millionaires? | Alex Bronzini-Vender

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      “I actually love the concept,” Donald Trump recently told Time magazine of a proposal circulating within his cabinet to raise taxes upon those earning over $1m. “I don’t want it to be used against me politically, because I’ve seen people lose elections for less, especially with the fake news.”Few presidential administrations have killed sacred cows at a faster rate than that of Donald Trump. But this really is shocking: a sitting Republican president praising a proposal to raise taxes upon the wealthy, adding only the slight caveat that it would be adversely spun by those in “the fake news”. A tax increase, Trump apparently believes, would be tenable as policy but not as politics.Trump says something similar of almost every idea thrown his way, and commentators have long observed that the surest way to change the president’s mind is to be the last person who spoke to him. Perhaps more interesting than Trump’s judgment on the issue, then, is that leading members of his cabinet have endorsed a similar tax hike. Longtime anti-tax activists are panicked. As the Lever recently noted, there’s every reason to believe that serious cracks are appearing in the Republican anti-tax coalition.First: why? The proposal itself is a brainchild of the conservative American Compass thinktank, which, in a June 2024 white paper, proposed raising taxes upon the wealthy to pay down the American national debt. “The constituency and base of the Republican party is shifting,” Oren Cass, American Compass’s founder, told the Atlantic in April. To extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts by simply adding $5tn to the American national debt would be, in Cass’s words, “pathetic, embarrassing, and outright cheating”.Steve Bannon, like Cass, has long fretted about the contradiction between the Maga movement’s populist posture and its upwardly redistributive governance. “This is a 1932-type realignment, if we do this right,” Bannon told Semafor in December. “You have to break that mindset that stock buybacks are fine, that crony capitalism is fine, and the tax breaks for the corporations are fine, then you’re going to squander a unique moment in history.”The proposal’s origins might be among the movement’s heterodox policy impresarios, but – more confusingly – its potential backers within the White House aren’t just self-styled economic populists like JD Vance. Those reportedly open to the idea also include mainstream conservatives like Russell Vought, director of the office of management and budget and a stalwart of the Heritage Foundation, and Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager and Trump’s treasury secretary.Their voices confound the expectation that the party’s “realignment” wing is driving the breakdown of the Republican consensus on tax-cutting. Instead, it’s something much more prosaic: the Trump administration’s economic team has realized that an abnormally large slice of the American debt needs to be refinanced this year.Trump administration officials hoped that, following Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement, investors would seek safety from a faltering stock market by shifting capital into US treasury bonds. Such a move, they reasoned, would drive bond prices up and yields down – since bond yields fall when prices rise, as the fixed interest payments become less attractive relative to the purchase price. Lower yields, in turn, would ease the government’s borrowing costs.And for a moment, it seemed the plan was working. The 10-year yield dipped, and Trump touted it as validating his tariff strategy. But the movement didn’t hold. Rather than rotating into bonds, investors fled both equities and treasuries, spooked by inflationary pressure from tariffs, fiscal instability and rising geopolitical risk. The result was a sharp drop in demand for government debt, a spike in yields and a higher cost of borrowing – precisely the outcome the White House had hoped to avoid.The Trump administration’s one weird trick to refinance at lower costs than necessary failed. Now, the Republicans have two remaining options: cut spending, or cut the tax-cutters loose.What does that portend for the future of American conservatism? Whether or not the Trump administration follows through on raising taxes on the wealthy – it likely won’t – the fiscal compact that’s underpinned American conservatism has, at least in the near term, become unsustainable.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSince the presidency of Ronald Reagan, conservatives have largely managed to slash taxes on the wealthy without pursuing correspondingly deep austerity measures. Public debt has made up the difference. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” Dick Cheney reportedly told the treasury secretary as the Bush administration sought a second round of tax cuts in 2003. But, at least over the next year, deficits will very much matter. And however the Republicans choose to resolve their impasse, a critical flank of the Trump coalition – either the wealthy or the party’s increasingly working-class base – will need to pay.If the Republican fiscal bargain is breaking apart, the GOP will need another way to unify its increasingly disparate base. The Democrats have long suffered from a similar issue: the statistician Andrew Gelman observed in 2007 that the real mystery of Americans’ voting behavior wasn’t that working-class voters were drifting towards the GOP – an overstated effect at the time – but that rich and poor alike were casting their lot with Democrats. The Democrats resolved this, but to mixed results. Rather than take on the deeper structural questions of economic inequality, they focused their campaigns on defending existing programs like social security and Medicare, advancing measured reforms in the name of racial justice, and protecting rights to abortion and same-sex marriage.Perhaps the crack-up of the tax-cutting coalition will lead the Republican party to attempt that compromise a l’envers. Just as the Democrats sidestepped thorny economic issues by rallying around the defense of widely accepted civil rights, the GOP could turn away from its longstanding economic bargain – the one that has defined its politics since Reagan – and instead double down on its campaign to undermine those same rights. In deepening its abuses against noncitizens, racial and sexual minorities, and activists on behalf of Palestinian rights, the Trump administration might perceive itself as restoring purpose to a party sorely lacking it.It’s too soon to tell. What is certain, however, is that the tax-cutting coalition as we know it has become deeply unsustainable. Tax-cutting once unified the Republicans. But, in forcing Trump to choose between taxing the top or deeper austerity for the bottom, it now threatens to blow it apart.

      Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York More

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      Trump 100 days: White House action plan makes Project 2025 look mild

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      When Donald Trump chose a Project 2025 author to lead a key federal agency that would carry out the underpinnings of the conservative manifesto’s aims, he solidified the project’s role in his second term.Shortly after he won re-election, the US president nominated Russ Vought to lead the office of management and budget. Vought wrote a chapter for Project 2025 about consolidating power in the executive branch and advances a theory that allows the president to withhold funds from agencies, even if Congress has allocated them. Consolidating power, in part through firing a supposed “deep state” and hiring loyalists, is a major plank of the project – and of Trump’s first 100 days.Trump tried, repeatedly, to distance himself from the project, led by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, on the campaign trail after the left used it as shorthand for the dismantling of government that would take place if he won. Since he’s taken office, the illusion that his ideas were drastically different from the project has fallen.“The whole distancing themselves from Project 2025 may have pulled some voters,” said Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, but “my sense is that they’re going to try and push all the items within Project 2025 as much as they can.”Many of Trump’s moves in his first 100 days come directly from Project 2025, which involved more than 100 conservative organizations and represented a sort of consensus among the Trumpist right about what he should do in a second term. In some instances, he has gone beyond the project’s suggestions. And in other cases, because the project was written in 2023, subsequent policy ideas from the Heritage Foundation have shaped his actions and goals.For instance, the project predated Elon Musk’s outsized role in the election and then in the Trump administration, but the goal to slash government programs using the so-called “department of government efficiency” fits the spirit of the project. It also predates the war in Gaza and the crackdown on speech in the US in the name of antisemitism, but Heritage’s Project Esther laid out a strategy to crack down on civil society groups that support Palestinian rights.Trump’s campaign once said people associated with the project wouldn’t get jobs in his administration. Instead, several hold prominent roles, in some cases now carrying out the plans they wrote about in the project.He chose Peter Navarro as a trade adviser; Navarro wrote a chapter for the project that advocates for increased tariffs and a restructuring of US trade, which Trump is now working on. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, appeared in training videos for Project 2025. Brendan Carr, Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the chapter on the FCC.The former director of the project, Paul Dans, stepped down from his role amid concerns that the project was derailing Trump’s re-election effort. Dans told Politico in March that Trump’s second term was “actually way beyond my wildest dreams”.“What we had hoped would happen has happened. So I can’t imagine how anything could end really any better,” Dans said.Will Dobbs-Allsopp, policy director of Governing for Impact, and James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, have publicly tracked the executive actions suggested for 20 different agencies in Project 2025 as Trump has carried some of them out. Of the 532 proposals in the project that fall under these actions, Trump has already proposed, attempted or completed 153 of them – about 29%.The belief that Trump was not fully prepared, and the broader conservative ecosystem was not aligned completely with his agenda, underpinned his first term. For his second term, conservative donors put major money into efforts to get the right on the same page and to come up with plans and personnel who would stand ready to implement these plans immediately if Trump won.While thinktanks often seek to influence policymakers, the project stands out for its focus on Trump.“Really, it was written for Trump or Trumpism,” Goodwin said. “There really was an audience of one in mind … Trump had as much gravitational pull on Project 2025 as Project 2025 hopes to have on Trump. It’s just a very unusual thinktank-policymaker relationship.”Where Trump has used the projectThe threads of Project 2025 are visible across the federal government in Trump’s second term.He is in the process of firing people disloyal to the Trump agenda, a first step in creating a government more beholden to him. An executive order signed in April called for tens of thousands more roles being listed as political appointments rather than career civil servants, a move Project 2025 promoted as a way to drive out the kinds of people who stood in the way of success in his first term.Project 2025 called for dismantling the Department of Education, which would require congressional action. Trump signed an executive order calling on the education secretary to start the dismantling process by shutting down major parts of the department’s work.The project wanted to scale back the US Agency for International Development. Trump axed it.“Libs are realizing that Project 2025 was the watered down version of this White House action plan,” Tyler Bowyer, a leader with conservative youth group Turning Point, said on X in early February.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe project said that programs related to climate change should be ended; Trump has ended a host of climate programs and has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement.The Department of Justice should be reconfigured, ending a host of policies and enforcement that came during the Biden years, the project says. Trump has weaponized the department to achieve his goals and to go after his enemies.In nearly all agency recommendations, the project suggested scrapping any diversity efforts. Trump ended diversity, equity and inclusion programs government-wide. He has taken actions to prohibit transgender people in sports and in the military and limited access to gender-affirming care, which aligns with ideas in the project that seek to reinforce binary genders.The project recommended a host of ways to deport undocumented immigrants, end visa programs for people to come to the US legally, and restrict border crossings – a key part of Trump’s first 100 days, though the project didn’t suggest using the Alien Enemies Act, as Trump has, or going after birthright citizenship.Trump signed an executive order that would make states carry more of a burden for disaster relief, another idea suggested by Project 2025, which also said withholding disaster funds was one way to enforce immigration laws.The FCC, now led by a Project 2025 author appointed by Trump, is investigating National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System and will potentially defund them, which Carr wrote about in the project.What could happen nextThe first wave of Project 2025-aligned actions has been conducted largely by executive orders. A second wave of recommendations requires the rulemaking process at agencies and others would require congressional action.“They’re only just now starting their kind of policy, deregulatory effort, rescinding regulations in earnest. They haven’t even really gotten there yet. They’ve been so focused on agency operations and personnel for the past few months,” Dobbs-Allsopp said. “We would expect that at six months or a year, they will be even further along.”Sinha predicted that the full-scale dismantling of the administrative state, if successful, could bring the US “back to the era of tainted meat and lead in hot water”.Project 2025 represented the extreme version of what the Republican party has been selling since the Nixon and Reagan years, she said. It mixes the anti-government rhetoric with demonizing immigrants, poor people and people of color. “The Republicans have trafficked on this for a very long time,” she said.“The people who hate government basically are running government,” she said. More