I usually stay out of public conversations about politics, one because it’s not my area of expertise, two, because these conversations are rarely productive. In our post-truth world, people on the left get their news from liberal sources, people on the right get theirs from conservative sources, and this divide causes a lack of foundational facts that the two sides can work upward from.
Sometimes politics hit so close to home that it’s unavoidable, which is exactly what happened one week into Trump’s second term, when he issued a blanket freeze on trillions of dollars of federal funding.
My wife works for a local nonprofit that helps keep the region’s freshwaters clean, partly by securing money for farmers to implement sustainable agricultural practices. Her job is funded directly by a federal grant, so when the freeze took hold in late January, her future with the organization fell into limbo. Her boss assured her that her position was safe (for now), that they had a rainy-day fund to keep the paychecks coming, but still, there’s a palpable sense of uncertainty in the air.
Though the judicial system has pushed back on the freeze, many funds remain inaccessible, including those sustaining my wife’s job. Most of the projects her organization had planned with local farmers have ground to a halt, and since the federal government isn’t providing guidance, no one knows when, or if, they’ll begin again. The fact that she works in the environmental field doesn’t bode well, either, considering Trump has made it clear that he couldn’t care less about environmental protections (“Drill, baby, drill!”). Even if the funds are eventually released (no guarantee), what’s stopping Trump from blowing it all up again, in the name of governmental thrift?
My wife, of course, isn’t the only person who’s been adversely affected by the arbitrary freeze. As one New York Times article put it: “Recipients of a vast array of federal grants, large and small, said they remained in the dark. They have been left to stop their projects — wildfire prevention in Montana, solar panels in Massachusetts, an emergency shelter in Mississippi — and stiff their vendors, waiting for explanations that do not come. Is this just a misunderstanding? A glitchy computer system, overloaded by panicky groups trying to get their money? Or is their grant gone forever?”
One of our friends, who works in the molecular bioscience department at the University of Texas, is unable to access a $500,000 research grant crucial to her position. The Washington Post ran a piece about how farmers across the country who invested their own money in various projects with the promise of USDA reimbursements are up the creek without a paddle, for who knows how long:
Farmers who signed contracts with the USDA under those programs paid up front to build fencing, plant new crops and install renewable energy systems with guarantees that the federal government would issue grants and loan guarantees to cover at least part of their costs. Now, with that money frozen, they’re on the hook.
Laura Beth Resnick, who runs a Maryland flower farm, said she signed a contract for the USDA to cover half of a $72,900 solar panel installation. In late January, she said, she was told her reimbursement payment was rejected because of Trump’s executive order.
My wife and I are worried, too, about my son, who has a rare genetic disorder, losing his Medicaid benefits. Trump has vowed to “love and cherish” Medicaid, but words mean little coming from a man with such a dubious relationship with honesty, a man who seems hell-bent on treating the government like an infection to be purged.
Considering Medicaid portals in several states were temporarily inaccessible in the wake of the spending freeze (with a red banner across the top of the page that cited executive orders as the cause for potential “delays and/or rejections of payments”), I’m skeptical of Trump’s commitment to preserving this crucial program. It doesn’t seem like any agency or initiative is off the table for this administration, given the fact that Trump and his cronies have careened out of the gate like a band of coked-out horses, taking one haphazard action after the next and seemingly reveling in the chaos.
Now, listen: I don’t think anyone would object to the idea that cutting government waste can be a good thing. Every American wants their tax dollars used efficiently. But waste, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it. So far, it seems like Trump 2.0 has mostly gone about it the wrong way, or at least in the most disorderly way possible.
How would a reasonable administration have dealt with trimming governmental excess? Through Congress, primarily, and by respecting the constitution, but also by embracing nuance, by taking a fine-toothed comb to the grants and loans being issued and weeding out the surfeit. This probably still would’ve led to important funding being cut to partisan ends, but at least there would’ve been an underlying logic to it all, an appearance of reason, a deliberate process that perhaps wouldn’t have caused so much acute confusion. What Trump did was plant a bomb and walk away with little regard for the people in the blast zone. I find it hard to believe that no one in his administration foresaw the negative implications of the funding freeze, that among the allegedly smart people he’s surrounded himself with, not one considered the millions of Americans, liberal and conservative, who’d be negatively affected when the money simply evaporated.
I don’t think the main issue is incompetence, though that may be a lesser factor. I refuse to believe Trump, and the people he’s surrounded himself with, is/are dumb. Mired in an echo chamber, maybe. Blinded by a lust for unchecked power, likely. But not dumb. The real issue with Trump 2.0, I think, is a troubling lack of empathy, which is much scarier than raw stupidity.
If Trump’s first month in office has proved anything, it’s that he seems to view people, especially but not specifically those who disagree with him, as abstractions, little more than numbers on a page, spending to be curtailed, aliens to be rounded up, enemies to be eliminated, pawns to be subjected to his will, populations to be absorbed. In short, he doesn’t seem to care, or even possess the ability to care.
Demolition is an end, or the end, in itself, and if he hurts faceless people (to him) in the process, that’s just the cost of nuking the establishment. Governmental annihilation, after all, is what 77 million people elected him to do, and in his eyes, their approval gives him license to go full-bore, collateral damage be damned. His recent social media post suggests that he believes he’s operating under something approaching a divine mandate: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” What does it say about the health of our political system that a sitting president can say something like that and invite little more than a shrug?
The callousness of Trump 2.0 has extended well beyond the domestic funding freeze. There are too many instances to recount with brevity here, which is essentially the point of Trump’s flood-the-zone strategy, on which Ezra Klein wrote a phenomenal essay. The freeze of foreign aid, followed by the dissolution of USAID (which billionaire-in-chief Elon Musk has called a “ball of worms.”), is the most stark example of how this administration’s recklessness has had serious real-world effects.
USAID was essentially eliminated (or fed into the wood chipper, as Musk put it) overnight after 60-plus years of generally bipartisan support. I don’t doubt that there were specific aspects of USAID that could’ve been deftly scaled back. There have been complaints of inefficiency for years. But the rash approach taken by Trump seems to be an instance of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as Republican representative Don Bacon (Nebraska) put it.
“They were funding a lot of stupid stuff. That’s a fact,” Bacon said of USAID. “But they’re also doing a lot of good stuff, too … instead of taking a sledgehammer, let’s get the scalpel out.”
Consider two crucial foreign aid initiatives, both spearheaded by then-President George W. Bush: the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Presidential Malaria Initiative (PMI). Some 21 million people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on USAID for AIDS medication, including pregnant mothers who need it to ensure their babies aren’t born infected. By one estimation, the shuttering of PEPFAR will result in the birth of 230 HIV-positive babies per day. Meanwhile, PMI has reportedly reduced malaria-related deaths by 60-percent since its inception in 2005. The initiative has enjoyed many other successes, including distributing a seasonal malaria treatment that immunizes nearly 20 million children in West Africa.
It’s hard to fathom why a president would want to defund programs with such tangible, positive effects on humanity.
(Note: Don’t even try to visit the federal government’s PMI page. It’s currently blocked with the following message appearing in its place: “In order to be consistent with the President’s Executive Orders, this website is currently undergoing maintenance as we expeditiously and thoroughly review all of the content.”)
Lastly, there’s the literal waste that has resulted from the abrupt dismantling of USAID: as Inspector General Paul Martin noted in a report, half a billion dollars worth of emergency food assistance at ports, in warehouses, and in transit, mostly supplied by US farmers, is at risk of spoiling if it isn’t distributed soon. An additional 500,000 metric tons of food that’s “at sea or ready to be shipped” is also in limbo. Trump, never one to tolerate negative press or disobedience, fired Martin the day after the report was made public.
The issue isn’t that Trump wants federal funding to be cut back. It’s that he wants to slash funding utterly and immediately by any means necessary, with no consideration of the human suffering his actions cause. Trump, it should be noted, released waivers that, in theory, allowed some life-saving initiatives to resume (i.e. AIDS work), but early returns seem to suggest that the waivers have been mostly ineffectual and perhaps publicity stunts because, as one New York Times article put it:
…bank and email accounts have been locked, invoices are not being paid and there’s no way to fund ongoing work. Organizations on the ground need formal clearance to operate, but, in many cases, the USAID workers who provide that clearance were placed on leave. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the temporary reinstatement of hundreds of these workers, but these programs require more stability than appeals, injunctions and stays can provide.
A more thoughtful head of state would’ve preserved these crucial government initiatives in the first place, instead of making wholesale cuts, willy nilly, and then having to backpedal and decide what’s worth keeping. It seems to prove just how careless Trump is willing to be to maintain his image of Strong-Man-Who-Answers-to-No-One (not even, it seems, other branches of government). Instead of measuring twice and cutting once, he’s refusing to measure, cutting 1,000 times then retroactively trying to reassemble the pieces, all while claiming total victory.
***
In his short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the late David Foster Wallace wrote, from the perspective of one of these hideous men, that “if you can really see somebody just as a thing you can do anything to him, all bets are off, humanity and dignity and rights and fairness – all bets are off.”
I understand that sometimes impossibly tough decisions must be made that nearly require leaders to view people as objects (i.e. President Truman dropping the bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the hope that such devastation would save millions of lives in the long term). Being in a position of international leadership often requires those in charge to make calculated decisions that may seem heartless from an outside perspective.
To be clear, that’s not what’s happening here. The Trump administration is hurting people, many of whom are Americans, through capricious policy decisions that didn’t need to be enacted in the first place. I can envision a purportedly decent man like Truman truly deliberating over the moral implications of the decision he’s about to make, trying to see things from all sides. It’s hard to imagine Trump being so thoughtful, mainly because he hasn’t been. To be governed by men without brains is one thing, but I refuse to believe that’s what’s happening. To be governed by men without hearts, or at least Grinchian-sized hearts, is another ball of worms entirely.
Further reading
- Farmers on the hook for millions after Trump freezes USDA funds
- With aid cutoff, Trump halts agency’s legacy of ‘acting with humanity’
- As fellow pro-lifers, we are begging Marco Rubio to save foreign aid
- White House failed to comply with court order, judge rules
- Many groups promised federal aid still have no funds and no answers
- Trump’s USAID shutdown alarms Republican allies
- Inspector General’s report on the dissolution of USAID
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband, and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag. He can be reached at [email protected]
Share
