Their hate, their greed, their short-sightedness – and the law of unintended consequences – will be their undoing.
(The line above is my opinion. The rest of this is Paul Krugman.)
Federal funding for SNAP, the nutritional aid program still often referred to as food stamps, ends tonight. This will have catastrophic impacts on 42 million Americans, the great majority of them children, elderly or disabled.
Millions more Americans are about to discover that health insurance has become vastly more expensive, in many cases unaffordable.
Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer.But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections. For example, draconian work requirements for Medicaid — which would effectively throw millions off the program, largely by imposing paperwork burdens low-wage workers can’t overcome — weren’t scheduled to take effect until the end of 2026.
Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.
Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.
I guess it’s possible that Republicans will manage to limit the political damage by claiming — completely falsely — that the suffering about to hit millions is being caused by Democrats who want to lavish benefits on illegal immigrants and pay for sex change operations. That’s not hyperbole. Here’s the banner currently at the top of the Agriculture Department’s SNAP data page — its data page!
In the past it would have been unthinkable to display political propaganda, let alone grotesquely dishonest propaganda, on government data sites. But we’re in a new world.
We’ll just have to see how all this plays politically. But it’s clear that Republicans messed up badly on the implementation of Project 2025. Immense cruelty was always part of the plan, but policy wasn’t supposed to get this cruel, this soon.
So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.)
Read the whole thing. It’s really very good.
How Republicans Messed Up on Project 2025 (Paul Krugman)Post + Comments (150)
