WASHINGTON—Fouled up weather forecasts. Staff shortages slowing services. More workers dying of heat stroke on the job. More pollution, which leads to more asthma and unclean water. Cut down school lunches, with none in the summer. Veterans not getting VA health care. More hate crimes. Weaker labor laws and enforcement.
Those are just some practical impacts of Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s planned cuts. The data comes from the GOP platform, also known as Project 2025, plus the nation’s largest federal workers union, the Government Employees (AFGE), and the co-chairs of Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency”—billionaire Elon Musk and so-called entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
“From dismantling union contracts to targeting agency missions, AFGE and federal workers suffered tremendously during the first Trump administration,” the union said in a statement in response to a People’s World request. “A second Trump administration will bring back these same attacks and more on our union, our rights, and our ability to serve the American people.”
“We’ve faced challenges like this before, and we know what’s at stake. We know what’s coming—and we’re ready,” said AFGE President Everett Kelley. “This time, we’ll be even more prepared” for Trump’s onslaught. But “the American people should brace themselves for cuts to their benefits and services if President-elect Trump implements his anti-families policies,” Kelley explains.
While Democrats drift in Congress and head towards a February leadership showdown between two ex-mayors—Rahm Emanuel, who was hated in Chicago, and Martin O’Malley, who was beloved in Baltimore—some government workers are girding for Trump’s cuts, which AFGE calculates could turn the top 50,000 civil service positions into a spoils system and also result in mass firings.
The duo of corporate CEOs Trump put at the head of his “department” would go even further, they wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws,” they elaborated.
The twosome will “present a list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations,” they declared.
They don’t define what’s “illicit.” But Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy are three leading lights of the corporate class, which as a group, believes every government rule is “illicit.” Even Adam Smith, the first modern political economist, didn’t go that far. He realized, and wrote, that government rules are needed to prevent the capitalist market from damaging and destroying its customers.
But the schemes of Musk, Ramaswamy and their boss, Trump, spell chaos for the rest of us, AFGE warns. The practical impacts include:
- Job safety rules get trashed, and enforcement declines or disappears. AFGE noted the Democratic Biden administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has just put out a proposed rule protecting workers against excessive heat, indoors and out. That’s been a common—and sometimes deadly—problem, especially in farm fields and warehouses, when bosses don’t protect workers against triple-digit temperatures.
“It can take months for OSHA to review comments” on the standard and issue a final rule after comments close on Dec. 30, AFGE notes. “It’s unlikely Trump’s OSHA will finalize the rule in its current form and may be watered down if it is issued. The infectious disease standard is also unlikely to see the light of day.” OSHA sent that proposed rule to Biden’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “for review and it may not be released under the new administration at all.
“Without OSHA’s intervention, employers are less likely to spend time and money to protect workers from hazards. They also won’t be held accountable when violating the law,” AFGE says. Though it didn’t get into specifics, that’s what happened during the coronavirus pandemic, when OSHA “inspections” were done by phone and Zoom and complaints were rarely followed up. The agency was also under unwritten instructions to issue no rules.
- Weaker labor law and less enforcement. While AFGE didn’t delve into that topic, Trump did in his first term. He stacked the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board with corporate executives and anti-worker zealots. The NLRB budget remained frozen, as it had been for five years before he took office. Its General Counsel, the top enforcement officer, made known he wanted to roll back labor law by a century or more. And Trump’s separate labor board for federal workers followed his orders and abolished one small union, for immigration law judges, on the grounds they were all “supervisors.”
- More pollution. Trump’s first-term Environmental Protection Agency became known for rejecting its own scientists’ recommendations, or often looking the other way when health hazards from pollution loomed.
Oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and massive water pollution at the southern end of Lake Michigan, southeast of Chicago, were obvious examples. Musk and Ramaswamy have floated the idea of ending the special higher anti-pollution standards California imposes on cars and trucks—standards other states and indeed U.S.-based vehicle manufacturers follow.
- Cut down school lunch numbers and eliminate them entirely during the summer. This brainstorm is from Project 2025, too. But food services are among the cuts AFGE warns about.
“USDA should not provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes,” that GOP platform says. “Currently, students can get meals from schools even if they are not in summer school, which has, in effect, turned school meals into a federal catering program.”
The Agriculture Department, the Republicans say, “should work with lawmakers to restore” the school lunch program to its “original goal of providing food to K-12 students who otherwise would not have food to eat while at school. Federal school meals should be focused on children in need, and any efforts to expand student eligibility for federal school meals to include all K–12 students should be soundly rejected.”
So, for the hungry kids who can’t get a meal at home whenever they’re not in class, the Project 2025 authors say, essentially, “Let them starve.”
- Mass firings. AFGE noted that before Ramaswamy dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump, he proposed firing three-fourths of federal workers. He said those workers write federal rules and he wants to stop all rule-making and roll back rules which have been on the books for decades, a move the capitalist class cheers.
Supreme Court rulings will let “Trump implement any number of ‘rules governing the competitive service’ that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in their Journal op-ed.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home.”
- Outsourcing VA health care. Trump tried this during his first term, and Congress—including Democrats—went along, after a series of scandals about veterans not getting VA care while mid-level managers and top Trump-imposed corporate “advisers” covered up the mess. AFGE, which, with National Nurses United, represents VA workers, blew the whistle.
The solution was more “outsourcing” of care, over veterans’ objections, to private MDs who know little to nothing about the specialized diseases war veterans suffer from. They include exposure to toxic “burn pits” in Iraq, effects of Agent Orange, post-traumatic stress disorder, and massive brain injuries.
Trump’s platform envisions even more outsourcing, and Project 2025 explicitly states career senior civil servants should be transferred out of top presidentially appointed positions in the VA “on the first day in office” of Trump to “ensure political control of the VA.”
- Politicizing weather reports, making them unreliable. In a time of rapidly increasing, and increasingly dangerous, climate change, that’s a threat to people’s homes, food, and lives. Trump himself infamously said during his first term Hurricane Dorian was headed for Alabama, illustrating his belief of its track with his black Sharpie. The hurricane headed east, to Florida.
“National Weather Service forecasters had to correct him, leading their parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under pressure from the White House, to issue a statement undermining its own forecast and scientists,” AFGE notes. Trump, of course, denies climate change.
“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the right-wing ideologues of the Heritage Foundation recommended in Project 2025.
- More hate crimes. “During Trump’s first term, hate crimes surged across the country,” AFGE, citing FBI data, reports. “Since then, he and his allies intensified their rhetoric–accusing immigrants of poisoning the blood of the nation, insinuating that hiring women and minorities over white men has caused professional standards to decline, threatening to deport protestors, and questioning the basic human dignity of trans individuals.” These actions sparked widespread resistance among women, communities of color, and LGBTQ persons.
“Marginalized communities are bracing themselves for Trump’s plans to dismantle the federal government’s efforts to address racism and gender equity. This includes the plans to eliminate diversity programs in education and censor academic discussion of race and gender.”
Trump also wants to dismantle the Education Department, fire its workers he calls “radicals, zealots, and Marxists” and establish a new credentialing system for schools to mandate teaching history—and other subjects—“according to standards developed by the Trump administration.”
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