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Donald Trump is planning to restructure the entire federal government to more effectively hurt poor people. How do you hurt people through the structure of the government? By lumping safety net programs into a new department with the unpopular word “welfare” in its name—once you’ve formally redefined programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as “welfare” (which, remember, was ended as we know it back in 1996) and put them all together in one place, it’ll be that much easier to pick them off and defund them.
“They have been using the word welfare because it is pejorative,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “The programs you can call welfare are actually very small in comparison to SNAP, which is an income support necessary to help families, workers and millions of kids.”
The plan, developed by White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, would also “reorganize” 45 job training programs down to 16 job training programs, move Community Development Block Grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Commerce Department, and potentially merge the Labor and Education Departments. Basically, if there’s a program that’s helping low-income people and is run by staff who sympathize with its function and execute it competently, the Trump administration wants to shift the program to more hostile staff and weaken it enough to make it a serious target for funding cuts in the long run.
The good news is that this plan is unlikely to get through Congress. The bad news is literally everything else about it and what it signals for Trump’s plans for government and the direction of the Republican Party.