Trump Budget Proposal Shreds Health and Food Programs to Feed the War Machine

Last week, at a private Easter lunch, Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic saying that with the country at war, the federal government should offload Medicaid, Medicare, and child care expenditures onto the states. “We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars,” the MAGA leader said. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.”

Offloading vast medical expenses onto the states, the president acknowledged, would pressure states to raise their taxes, but that’s simply the price of doing war for Trump. For someone who campaigned on a cast-iron promise to strengthen Medicare and not start “new wars,” it was a stark U-turn that may put the health care access of tens of millions of Americans at risk.

Faced with a public relations debacle, the White House spin doctors immediately went into damage control, implausibly claiming that Trump was only talking about tackling “fraud” within these systems. Yet their efforts were undermined by the budget proposal that Trump released just days later, which reiterated the commitment to massively jack up military spending, including a nearly 50 percent year-on-year increase in the Pentagon’s budget at the expense of pretty much every part of the existing safety net. Trump is now urging the GOP to pass it in the next two months by budget reconciliation. Should Republican leaders decide to go down this route, they could bypass the Democrats and, despite the deep unpopularity of cuts to health care spending, implement an assault on the country’s health care services without going through the normal process of negotiations and compromise.

Trump’s budget — which comes on top of the trillion dollar-cuts to health care spending over the next decade thanks to his “big, beautiful bill” — includes a 12.5 percent (or $5 billion) cut to Health and Human Services; huge cuts to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; a gutting of health care services aimed at the LGBTQ community; large reductions in spending on behavioral health services; and a dismantling of infrastructure aimed at reducing socioeconomic health care disparities.

The administration is using the claims of “waste, fraud and abuse as a smokescreen for making these cuts,” Anthony Wright, executive director of the health care access advocacy organization Families USA, told Truthout. In reality, he argues, these cuts are ideologically driven: “It’s a dismantling of the infrastructure that addresses health equity, disease prevention, and disparities.” Drill deeper into the specifics, and one sees that the largest National Institutes of Health cuts fall on organizations, such as the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, that work on making health systems less inequitable, or on supposedly “woke” agencies such as the National Library of Medicine.

For Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, an alliance of more than 100 organizations that work on health care-related issues, Trump’s budget is a stark betrayal of many of his own voters. “The president is making his priorities quite clear,” she told Truthout. “He is turning away from meeting the needs of Americans. He is attempting to increase funds for military adventures around the world, a bloated military, military contractors getting more contracts, and developing a police state in our own nation.”

Weinstein highlights the budget’s request to eliminate the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which provides financial assistance to millions of families struggling to heat or cool their homes — and which will be even more vital this year, given the elevated energy costs triggered by Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran.

“He would totally wipe it [LIHEAP] out,” Weinstein explains. “He has told us there isn’t any money for child care. He has pushed for gigantic cuts to Medicaid. His priorities are clear: He does not care about us.”

For Weinstein, the military quagmire in Iran risks setting off a cascading series of domestic cuts in the U.S. “The more they’re stuck in it,” she says of the Iran war, “the more they’re going to want to pay for it by deeper cuts to food programs and health programs.”

Earlier this week, Politico reported that the budget proposal would eviscerate nutritional education programs, cut rural food assistance, and entirely eliminate the Food for Peace program. Fruit and vegetable benefits to pregnant women and young children would also be gutted from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (known as WIC) — from $54 per month for pregnant women to a mere $13. Weinstein notes that the cuts come at “a time when food prices are up,” and are likely to continue to increase due to the war in Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s supply of fertilizer transits. At current prices, that $13 is enough to buy only a couple small baskets of blueberries per month.

None of these proposals will “Make America Healthy Again,” as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. frames his agenda. Almost definitionally, these cuts will exacerbate health care disparities by making it harder for poorer Americans to access basic care and healthy foods.

“They’re using the anti-woke language as a mask to make much, much steeper cuts,” Wright argues. And they are doing so in the face of overwhelming public opposition. “Health care cuts,” says Wright, “are supremely unpopular and they’re only getting more unpopular with time.”