When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise rents at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed cutting federal disability benefits a quarter of a million underprivileged childrenon the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He tried to impose a requirement that poor parents cooperate collection of alimonyincluding single mothers reveal your sexual historybefore they and their children could receive food aid.
He tried accept the rule allowing employers to pocket tips for workers. And he did to accept the rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they earn more than $35,568 a year.
Trump and his Vice President-elect J. D. The Vances are running a campaign they say puts the working class first, promising to protect ordinary Americans from the influx an expatriate workerto return manufacturing jobs in the US, to support rural areas and families with children and, in general, stick it to the elites.
Critics respond with citations Project 2025, potential plan for Trump’s second presidency, which proposes major cuts to the social safety net for low-income families greater tax benefits for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his obvious connections to the authors, said that Project 2025 does not represent him.
However, his views on the working class and poor people can be found in the specific actions he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to determine public policy.
ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations he has tried to pass or revise through his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services, as well as quasi-independent agencies. such as the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.
We found that when Trump was in the White House, he pushed his administration’s agenda, which was designed to cut health care, food and housing, and job protection programs for poor and working-class Americans.
“Trump has proposed far more severe cuts to low- and moderate-income programs than any other president, including Reagan,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.
Trump has been stopped from achieving many of these goals largely because he has been ineffective in achieving them through the second half of his term. According to journalists covering him at the time, he was not ready to win the presidency in 2016, not to mention filling key positions and developing a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty.
He did control the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but used the only arrows in budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that cannot be processed by the opposite party) to reduce taxes for the rich and try to repeal Obamacare. Until 2019, his cabinet did not have much time to develop new rules, to implement them after a long time federal rulemaking handle and resolve any legal issues.
Trump and his allies look focused not repeat such mistakes when he wins the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress they said that this time, if they regain a majority in both houses, they will use their reconciliation bills to combine new tax cuts with aggressive cuts in social spending. Trump, meanwhile, is likely to issue new rules early in his term, in part to give legal challenges to them a chance to be heard in court. Supreme Court with the solid conservative majority he created.
If he relies on his first-term proposals, this will mean:
- Short for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP billions of dollars.
- Cancellation almost a million children right to free school lunches.
- Freezing Pell Grants for low-income college students so they don’t adjust for inflation.
- Revise and significantly cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets in excess of $2,250 as not enough poor to receive assistance, and lowering the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
- Eliminating several programs aimed at increasing the supply of and investment in affordable housing in low-income communities.
- Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for blackouts and other energy crises.
- It is reduced Work of the corps and nearly halving funding for job training programs that help people get off public assistance.
- Limitation collective bargaining rights trade unions through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.
Trump also never wavered from his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves low-income Americans. He cut in half the open enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA and reduced more than 80% funding efforts to help low-income people and others navigate the system. This particularly affected people with special needs or those with limited access to the Internet.
As a result of these and other changes, number of uninsured people in the US increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was passed, then increased again in 2018 and 2019. So far this year, there are 2.3 million fewer Americans than when Trump took office, including 700,000 fewer children.
President Joe Biden reversed many of these changes. But Trump could overturn them, especially if he has a majority in Congress.
Perhaps the most important thing is what Trump did with its administrative power during his first term — what he openly wants to do more of — is cut the civil service, targeting non-political federal employees he collectively calls the “Deep State.”
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It would also have a disproportionately negative impact on programs that serve poor and working Americans. Agencies such as the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development that provide disability and bereavement benefits and housing assistance for low-income families in times of need, rely heavily on mid-level staff in Washington, DC and local offices to process claims and get people help.
Caroline Leavitt, a national spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign, did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first term on issues that affect working-class people, and whether his second term agenda will be different.
Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying Trump defended those programs in his first term and would do it again. “By unleashing American energy, cutting job-killing regulations, and enacting pro-growth tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.
One is new allegedly a pro-worker policy proposed by Trump, as well as by his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris: eliminating tip taxes.
Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that increasing federal spending on welfare programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people should be less dependent on government assistance and take more personal responsibility.
And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree — who feel that their economic situation decreased relative to other demographic groups — are increasingly joining the Trump movement. Moreover, some counties have seen large increases in food stamp use in recent years keep voting for himdespite his attempts to cut that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump supporters there is better on average than often the media portrays them as such.)
Meanwhile, relief from the pandemic including incentive checksreally started during the Trump administration and helped reduce the poverty rate. But these efforts were a temporary response to the crisis and were mostly suggested Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.
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Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — Vance has repeatedly touted his Adjacent to the Appalachians Roots — It’s surprising that reporters haven’t paid close attention to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, an expert on poverty policy.
Will Trump, having won a second term, continue the Biden administration? effort to make sure the IRS doesn’t a disproportionate tax audit of poor people? He would defend Biden social security reformsaimed at ensuring that states actually use welfare money to help low-income families?
Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail, in debates and interviews, as the candidates and the reporters who cover them focus more on the middle class.
