Medicaid Isn’t the Only Popular, Lifesaving Program the GOP Will Cut

The budget blueprint that Congressional Republicans passed this week outlines a massive wealth transfer to the rich—at the expense of everyone else. While millionaires and billionaires will get $4.5 million worth of tax cuts, the Energy & Commerce committee, for instance—which oversees Medicaid—is supposed to find $880 billion to cut from government spending. As the GOP details precisely what they intend to cut over the coming weeks, it’s likely those proposals will put life-saving healthcare for 79 million Americans at risk. Trump didn’t run on a broad-based austerity agenda to dismantle essential government services, put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, endanger millions of lives and illegally seize power for himself so as to enrich the wealthy. But that’s the agenda his administration seems hell-bent on delivering.

Perhaps it seemed like a given that the GOP would make gutting climate funding and regulations on polluters a central part of this crusade. Or perhaps, compared to the devastating cuts to landmark social programs that seem all but certain given the size of the topline budget being proposed, getting rid of subsidies for electric vehicles and solar panels might seem like window dressing. Democratic opposition to GOP budget plans have understandably emphasized defending landmark social programs instead of smaller environmental and green energy initiatives: During a press conference Thursday morning, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries stood next to a sign saying “Save Medicaid,” and reiterated his party’s stance in budget negotiations: “Hands off Social Security. Hands of Medicaid. Hands off Medicare.”

What about everything else, though? It makes sense, of course, for Democrats to focus their messaging around programs that impact the lives of millions of people every single day. But climate and environmental programs also affect millions of people every day.

The reason people seem to have forgotten that is that, over the last four years, Democrats leaned into talking about climate change and green energy primarily as a business and/or geopolitical opportunity. Subsidies for clean energy products and manufacturing would revitalize the American middle class and allow the United States to outcompete China in key twenty-first century growth industries like EVs, top Biden aides insisted. With a little coaxing, the private sector would lead the way: roughly two-thirds of the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate and clean energy-related funding accrued to corporations.

The pitfalls of this shortsighted messaging were already apparent when Democrats struggled to campaign on it in the last election. They’re being highlighted again now as IRA funds are targeted for elimination: Thanks in part to the IRA’s top-down approach, most Americans still haven’t heard much about it; forty percent of registered voters don’t even know it exists. Although the vast majority of private investment spurred on by the IRA flowed to Congressional districts controlled by Republicans, outside of a few small pockets of discontent this hasn’t stopped the party from trying to claw back those same funds. (Why would it? Cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare will hurt plenty of Republicans; they’re in the GOP’s crosshairs all the same.) Republicans now seem poised to frame their gargantuan Energy & Commerce cuts as an attack on supposedly wasteful climate spending that much of the country didn’t realize was happening, re-directing attention away from wildly unpopular cuts to Medicaid.

The point here isn’t to cry over the milk spilled by Bidenomics’ strategic failures. But Democrats and climate advocates should avoid repeating the same mistakes. Climate and environmental programs aren’t luxury add-ons to embrace when times are good. Instead, they’re essential tenets of a modern state that help prevent death and immiseration—and they help make people’s lives better and cheaper in the meantime.

Helping U.S. companies compete in green export markets is all well and good, but it’s not the main reason to support climate policy. Preventing death is. The power plant pollution regulations the Trump administration wants to eliminate were expected to prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths a year from respiratory disease, heart disease, and more by 2035. Trump is also going after California’s clean car rules, projected to prevent 1,000 premature deaths by 2040. In the U.S. overall, 350,000 premature deaths per year are attributable to fossil fuel pollution.

Republican policies to expand fossil fuel production and tear up regulations—including a plan to slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 65 percent—would mean that even more people die. Dismantling Biden-era regulations on lead and PFAS will leave millions with toxic drinking water, contaminated with substances that contribute to cognitive impairment, asthma, and premature deaths from heart disease and cancer. Gutting the already understaffed, overworked U.S. Forest Service will starve efforts to reduce wildfire risk and leave fewer staff on hand to respond to flames fanned by rising temperatures, deepening a home insurance crisis which is already making home ownership and rent unaffordable in Florida, California, and several other states. The list goes on.

Important as it is to protect Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, the fact that Democrats’ most popular, defensible programs are at least 60 years old doesn’t inspire confidence in their ability to govern the future. Since 2016 the party’s main case for itself has been that it could prevent another Trump administration, restore norms, and return the country to a slightly greener version of a happier, quieter past. That failed, and Democratic leadership is once again relegated to defending programs enacted by their more ambitious and imaginative predecessors. The right has always been better at fighting for the past, though. The essentially conservative position that Democrats and progressives alike have adopted over the last several decades—to defend and expand on the gains of the New Deal and Great Society—is a bad fit both to build a governing majority, and for an era where the climate crisis is changing the country in permanent, unpredictable ways.

Fights over federal spending are showcasing a Republican Party that’s more revolutionary than conservative, trampling over Constitutional checks and balances in order to concentrate ever-more wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority. Trump was elected on the promise of change, but the administration mostly articulates its vision of a MAGA-fied future in the sorts of vague, braindead language that crypto scammers use to sucker people into buying shitcoins.

Democrats should take this opportunity to spell out what that future would actually mean: millions of people dying of preventable illnesses because they don’t have health insurance; family homes burned to the ground and replaced by luxury developments that foreign investors buy up to avoid paying taxes; parents kicked off Social Security and out of their homes, forced to move in with their children who are working two or three jobs just to afford their insurance premiums; kids who grow up with rare and debilitating diseases—if they don’t die of measles first—thanks to the toxins in their water, whose schools can’t support them because the richest man in the world ransacked the Department of Education. The world Trump and Musk want is hellish. But in order to persuade voters of that, and persuade them to kick this pair out of power, Democrats need to be able to promise a better one—not just more of the same.