This was not a speech meant to bring us together. 

President Trump’s speech to Congress on March 4 was his opportunity to flaunt his tightening grasp of power, and he reveled in it. He stoked resentment and repeatedly found ways to say that the way to “greatness” is to go backwards. Turn the clock back on who lives here, “our nation will be ‘woke’ no longer,” gender is just male and female, back to fossil fuels, back to taking land and wealth because we can. 

Let us not be distracted. The resentment-stoking, the targeting of federal workers and the dismantling of federal agencies, are all about seizing the means for the wealthy, certainly including the president himself, to control more and amass more wealth.

Seizing control requires getting rid of federal workers who enforce inconvenient laws and regulations, the kind that protect people from consumer or investment fraud, labor violations, environmental contamination, and threats to public health. It means ridding the IRS of the capacity to prevent billionaires from evading the taxes they owe, and crippling agencies that enforce laws against monopolies and price-fixing. Trump badly wants to make permanent and expand at least $4.5 trillion in tax breaks, overwhelmingly benefiting the ultra-rich. But that’s not the only way for the rich to get richer. Ignoring existing laws and tearing down existing regulations will make it dramatically easier for corporations to pile up profits. 

It serves the administration’s aims to claim that federal programs are rife with waste. If you can accuse federal programs of waste, you can justify firing workers and freezing funding. With far fewer workers, the administration can make it easier for corporations to make money at the expense of middle and especially low-income people. And if your goal is to replace government services with profitable privatized ones, it helps to claim that workers administering government programs are incompetent or corrupt. 

The president has found his rhetoric doesn’t have to be true to be good television.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s #HandsOffHousing rally in front of HUD HQ

Donald Whitehead

The day before the president’s speech, the National Low Income Housing Coalition organized a well-attended rally in front of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to protest HUD’s plans to cut its workforce in half, with one HUD agency, the Office of Community Planning and Development slated to lose 84% of its staff, thereby decimating $3.6 billion in programs for homelessness prevention, disaster recovery, and affordable housing. Rep. Maxine Waters and other House members attempted to present the new Secretary of HUD Scott Turner with a letter opposing these drastic cuts but were not allowed to go up to his office. Many speakers talked about how HUD workers protect people from homelessness. Donald Whitehead, Executive Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, reminded us that over the past two years, homelessness has increased more than 30 percent.

Alayna Waldrum

Alayna Waldrum of the American Association of Service Coordinators said that HUD was cutting contracts with organizations working on fair housing. Rep. Steven Horsford, representing Las Vegas, said that one in three homes in that city is owned by private equity firms which jack up rent. He claimed that Elon Musk and President Trump are “tearing down our communities” by gutting HUD’s capacity to encourage homeownership and protect against private equity investors swallowing up housing stock. 

Rep. Waters and members of Congress in front of HUD HQ

This is the reality of the impact of the Trump administration cuts. They are not cutting waste – they are cutting the means to fight against housing discrimination and the fees and fines against renters that drive them out of housing.

That’s just one example of the rhetoric of “waste” versus the reality of cuts that will harm people and communities. Listening to the president’s speech, I heard him mention a child who had gotten cancer because of exposure to a chemical. Trump called for getting “toxins” out of our environment, a nod to issues raised by his new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And yet, focus on what the administration is actually doing, and see that they are canceling environmental justice contracts – the kinds of projects that will reduce toxic exposure in children and adults alike because low-income communities, disproportionately of color, have been victimized by exposure to such poisons. Freezing at least $20 billion in Environmental Protection Agency funding passed by Congress for projects to help victimized communities, the Trump administration has dragged its feet in restoring the funds when ordered to by a court. A judge has issued temporary restraining orders to halt the funding freeze until the issue can be argued on its merits. In a five-page order issued Feb. 10, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island said that it was clear that the administration had in some instances continued “to improperly freeze federal funds.” 

While calling on Congress to enact tax breaks, the president was notably silent on the ways Congress will pay for them. He spoke of the child with cancer, but did not say, as he has recently, that we must “cherish” Medicaid. In his litany of supposedly wasteful government funding (most claims refuted by careful fact checker analysis), Trump is abetting the convenient rationale pushed by House leadership to gain enough votes for their budget resolution, which would require at least $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid or other health programs, as well as $230 billion that would target SNAP. They asserted that such mammoth cuts could be achieved by getting at “waste, fraud and abuse.”

No. These are lies we must reject. At a virtual Hands off Medicaid rally organized by Protect Our Care and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), held the day after President Trump’s speech, a lot of truth was spoken. Jessi Bolmer, a care worker from Illinois and member of SEIU, told her story, one part of which was that she developed cancer while working as a home care worker. She had health insurance through work, but the coverage was not adequate for her chemotherapy treatments, and lost her housing as she struggled to pay her medical bills. She slept in her car while remaining at work, still undergoing treatment. Finally, she was able to get Medicaid coverage, and that helped her to be housed again. Or listen to Elena Hung, Executive Director and co-Founder of Little Lobbyists. She said “Medicaid saved my family.” Elena’s daughter, now 10 and in the fourth grade, was born with multiple serious medical conditions. Medicaid has provided the care that allows her daughter to attend school with the help of a nurse. Elena made the impassioned plea which I’m paraphrasing: Medicaid is essential, and we must get everyone we can reach to tell Congress: “Americans do not want to steal from disabled children to give tax breaks to billionaires like Musk.”