Bipartisan Austerity Logic Set the Stage for the GOP Budget
Donald Trump’s budget is a particularly cruel manifestation of the bipartisan consensus of the preceding decades that has refused to treat health care and other basic necessities for a dignified life as public goods.

President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law during an Independence Day military family picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Samuel Corum / Getty Images)
As President Donald Trump, surrounded by Republican members of Congress, marked the Fourth of July by signing a bill to cut health care and food benefits for millions of Americans to finance corporate tax cuts, Democrats fired back — with moral outrage, polished messaging, and blatant political opportunism.
After House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) spoke for more than eight hours against the bill, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee responded not with a substantive moral countervision but instead shared a flattering photo of Jeffries captioned, “Hakeem Jeffries is the leader America deserves.” And shortly after the legislation passed, liberal leaders and pundits began channeling public outrage into campaign strategy. House Democratic whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) declared, “Project 2026 starts today.”
Jen Psaki, Biden’s former press secretary-turned-MSNBC anchor, remarked that the bill “reminds me a lot of what the midterm elections looked like last time Trump was president,” recalling how Democrats gained ground in red districts by riding a wave of backlash to Trump’s policies.
This is how Democratic politics often functions now: not as a counterforce to cruelty but as a machine for managing it. The party treats mass suffering not as a call for transformation but as fuel for the next election. While Republicans signed this particular bill, the inconvenient truth for the Democrats is that they, too, played a role in setting the stage for this cruelty through decades of bipartisan market-based logic that gutted the social safety net.
Make no mistake: It is undeniable that the Republicans are at greater fault. As a party, they have long approached poverty not as a problem to be solved but as a moral failing to be punished. This bill doubles down on that logic by embedding strict work requirements for basic social goods that stigmatize the poor and restrict aid to the most desperate.
The result, passed along party lines, is expected to strip Medicaid coverage from nearly 12 million people and slash food assistance at a time when inflation, housing insecurity, and medical debt already plague working-class families across the country. It is a declaration that the poor are expendable, that austerity is patriotic, and that in Trump’s America, cruelty is the point.
Trump was supposed to signal the end of the neoliberal consensus. He promised to be the disruptive outsider who would tear up establishment orthodoxy. But this bill is a continuation, albeit a more ruthless one, of the very project he claimed to reject. For decades, and rooted in Reaganomics, both parties have endorsed a governing model that treats poverty as a personal failure, public goods as liabilities, and market growth as the highest good.
Stripping away what little remains of that safety net to fund tax breaks for the wealthy is not a deviation from the bipartisan status quo; it is its logical conclusion. While the wealthy and corporate elite reap billions in giveaways, struggling families will face empty pantries, lapsed prescriptions, and impossible choices. It is a return to the harshest logic of market governance: starve the public to feed the private.
And in doing so, it exposes something deeper: not just a failure of policy but the bankruptcy of a political class that no longer believes in anything beyond survival.
The Quiet Reality of America’s Social Safety Net
What’s striking isn’t just the cruelty of the bill; it’s that this outcome was made possible by decades of bipartisan consensus. For years, both parties have treated health care not as a right but as a commodity — something to be managed by the market, with the government acting as a partner to private insurers rather than a guarantor of care.
Rather than confront the for-profit model, Democrats have joined Republicans in focusing on market-based solutions that preserve the primacy of private health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, often hailed as President Barack Obama’s signature achievement, is a prime example. Branded as a major expansion of care, it was in reality a public-private bargain shaped in consultation with the insurance industry.
The public option, initially supported by Obama and many Democrats, was abandoned after fierce opposition from corporate stakeholders like the American Medical Association, a powerful physician lobbying group. Instead insurers got new customers, their profits were protected, and the structural power of private industry remained largely unchallenged.
And despite persistent calls to adopt a version of universal health care, Joe Biden made his position on Medicare for All unmistakable during his 2020 presidential campaign.
“If they got [Medicare for All] through by some miracle . . . then you got to look at the cost,” he said. “I want to know, how did they find $35 trillion? What is that doing? Is it going to significantly raise taxes on the middle class, which it will?” He went on: “I would veto anything that delays providing the security and the certainty of health care being available now.” In a country where medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy, Biden didn’t question the cost of the current system; he defended it.
In this worldview, market-based insurance is the norm for most Americans, while Medicaid is reserved for those living in extreme poverty. The Big Beautiful Bill is particularly cruel not because it is an outlier — but because it is the result of a bipartisan consensus that refuses to treat health care and other basic necessities for a dignified life as public goods.
The bill cuts Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by imposing stricter work requirements despite decades of evidence that these rules do little to improve employment and disproportionately harm people with disabilities, caregivers, and those in precarious jobs. These same punitive requirements were championed during the Clinton era.
And rather than challenge the notion that health care must be earned through labor, the bill reinforces it — echoing the Affordable Care Act’s means testing and market logic. Both parties have accepted a framework in which only the very poor deserve help, and even then, only under surveillance. Trump’s cruelty is certainly worse, but the architecture was built long before he took office.
What is rarely named by political leaders is just how dire life has become for the working class in America. For a single adult living in the seventh-poorest county in the United States — Holmes County, Mississippi — the Economic Policy Institute estimates a necessary income of around $42,440 per year. By contrast, the median household income there is just $28,818.
The Affordable Care Act required states to expand Medicaid eligibility to adults earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level — roughly $20,780 for an individual or $35,630 for a family of three. It is only slightly more generous for pregnant women, children, the elderly, and the disabled. These conditions — means-tested, complex, state-specific — are the quiet reality of America’s social safety net: a fragmented system that forces people to prove they are poor enough to deserve help while leaving millions just above the cutoff to fend for themselves in a predatory market.
Yet this structural cruelty rarely enters mainstream political discourse. Instead Democrats continue to defend a system they helped design, treating modest expansions as moral victories while avoiding any reckoning with the human cost. We’ve already seen what a more expansive approach to the safety net can do. During the pandemic, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan beefed up access to health care, food assistance, and other financial support such as the Child Tax Credit. As a result, child poverty declined by 30 percent.
This could have been the start of something different, something better. But these gains were treated as emergency exceptions, not a new baseline. When the crisis subsided, so did the ambition. With the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit, 3.7 million more children fell into poverty. The unfreezing of Medicaid enrollment led to a bureaucratic nightmare, resulting in the disenrollment of over 25 million people from the program.
The state of poverty in America was never considered an emergency in itself, only a problem to be managed when it threatened political stability.
Now as Republicans slash Medicaid and food assistance, Democrats mourn the loss of a social safety net they themselves refused to meaningfully expand when they had the chance.
Complicity Dressed in Strategy
The truth is, the Democratic Party doesn’t lack ideas — it lacks will. More specifically, it lacks the political courage to divorce itself from its overwhelming reliance on dark money from corporate donors who are profiting mightily from the status quo.
For example, the private insurance industry brings in massive profits from unaffordable care and medical debt. It also remains deeply embedded in the party’s policymaking infrastructure. In the past two presidential election cycles, pharmaceutical companies gave more money to Democrats than Republicans.
In turn, Democratic leaders continue to defend a system built on fragmentation, privatization, and precarity. Programs like Medicaid are treated as the ceiling of government responsibility, not the floor. The result is a political class that refuses to confront the root source of massive suffering.
Part of the Democrats’ political project in the age of Trump has been to define him as the singular source of political evil rather than a symptom of the deeper rot created by decades of bipartisan austerity. In this framing, Trump becomes the aberration, and Democrats the responsible adults in the room.
Structural reforms like Medicare for All are dismissed as too polarizing or unrealistic, even as 63 percent of US adults say the government has a responsibility to provide health coverage for all. Meanwhile, just 30 percent of Americans currently hold a favorable view of Democrats in Congress.
The disconnect could not be clearer: the party insists on caution and incrementalism, even as the public demands something bolder and more humane.
Yes, the GOP is cruel. This bill is proof: a deliberate act of harm wrapped in patriotic branding, passed on a holiday meant to celebrate freedom. Stripping food and medical care from millions is not governance — it is punishment. And it reveals the Republican Party’s long-standing belief that the poor must be disciplined, not supported; that survival should be earned, not guaranteed.
But Democrats helped build the system in which this cruelty is possible. They have treated the meagerness of the safety net not as an emergency but as a norm. They tinker at the edges of a broken system, then act shocked when Republicans tear into its foundations. That is not meaningful opposition — it’s a decades-long collaboration in managing decline.
Over the holiday weekend, fireworks lit the sky as millions braced for the loss of health care and food assistance. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee responded not with outrage or vision but with graphics — highlighting which Republicans to blame, which seats to flip, which message to test next.
Democrats have shown us who they are: a party that defends the machinery of decline with better manners. They preserve the terms of a bipartisan consensus that punishes the poor and protects the powerful. They do not fight for transformation. They do not offer a vision of justice. They offer a quieter version of the same abandonment.
This is not resistance. It is complicity dressed in strategy. And no one should be asked to cheer for that.