The Government Programs They’re Axing Came from Our Struggles
Rolling back DOGE: In over a thousand rallies on May Day, demonstrators united against a dictatorship by and for the rich. Photo: Jenny Brown
Ronald Reagan used to say the scariest nine words were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Wait, what?
When my house was half destroyed by Hurricane Frances in 2004, a Federal Emergency Management Agency agent showed up three days later and cut us a check so we could get the giant tree off the house and do temporary repairs. Through FEMA, we were able to get a $20,000 low-interest loan from the Small Business Administration so we could rebuild. The federal government was there to help.
But Trump is trying to get rid of FEMA, and just fired the agency’s head for wanting it to continue.
Corporations have big ad budgets to tell us how wonderful they are. But government services don’t advertise: They’re crucial but invisible. My mom is 88 and has two artificial hips. As an implantable medical device, they were tested by the Food and Drug Administration and they’ve served her well for decades.
When a different brand of artificial hip turned out to shed its newfangled metal coating into patients’ bloodstreams, there was justifiable outrage. Why had these been approved?! Left on their own, private companies would be constantly putting things on the market like that.
WON THROUGH STRUGGLE
The government programs under attack were won by ordinary people to defend ourselves from rapacious corporations.
Who makes sure our food isn’t deadly? The “government bureaucrats” at the FDA. The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906 because people like you and me had had enough of poisonous food packed in filthy plants and kept fresh-looking with formaldehyde.
In the 1960s, car crash victims were getting impaled by glass shards until the consumer movement demanded change: They passed a law mandating auto glass, which breaks into harmless cubes.
Reagan-era propaganda tried to convince us government can’t do anything right, and attacked the workers as lazy. “That’s why it’s so slow,” they claimed. But if you ask the workers doing that work, they’ll tell you it’s really because they’re understaffed. A pharmacist friend at the VA says that under Trump, empty positions in her department aren’t allowed to be filled, leading to waits and a hectic, exhausting work pace.
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The Trump administration aims to get rid of 83,000 VA workers.
Services are slow because they’re being starved by the same politicians who complain that government can’t do anything right, to justify starving it more.
Why do mega-billionaires like Elon Musk want to eliminate these things that are so important to our lives? Sure, they want to justify a fat tax cut. But they’ve always hated these programs.
They don’t want to be regulated, they don’t want to have to go back to the drawing board when their product is found to be useless or harmful. They don’t want to be stopped from price-gouging, or from dumping waste in the river.
They don’t want competition from lower-priced government services, like the Post Office. They don’t want to be required to pay the minimum wage, or get fined if they steal wages or operate dangerous workplaces. And they certainly don’t want their workers to have the right to form a union.
WHAT WE COULD LOSE
It’s true that they probably underestimate how much government contributes to their own ability to profit, by maintaining interstates, ports, and airports, subsidizing childcare, or predicting the weather. Federal grants fund basic research, and big pharma profits. The Post Office delivers cheaply for Amazon.
But their general belief is that everything should be done for profit in the private sector. Instead of collectively paying in—all of us a little, but the rich a lot more—to have clean water or veteran health care or national parks, we are supposed to purchase these things from for-profit companies, or do without.
The best advocates are turning out to be the federal workers who provide those services, who know better than we do what we’re about to lose. Let’s join them to defend the government safeguards and services we workers won over generations of struggle.
