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Column: The GOP attack on the safety net and middle-class programs begins to take shape

Published

1 year ago

January 21, 2025

Column: The GOP attack on the safety net and middle-class programs begins to take shape

No one can be surprised that Republicans are hoping to exploit their Washington trifecta — the White House and majority control of the House and Senate — by implementing vast federal budget cuts in order to save their 2017 tax cuts from expiration.

Now we’re beginning to see some meat on the bare bones of GOP policies, thanks to a “menu” of fiscal policy reforms recently leaked to Politico.

The one-page document, which Politico reports was produced by the House Budget Committee chaired by Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), lists dozens of cutbacks adding up to supposed savings of as much as $5.7 trillion over 10 years.

We ought to be able to unleash growth through tax cuts … and we ought to be able to bend the spending curve.

— House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas)

The primary near-term goal appears to be staving off the expiration next year of the 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited corporations and the wealthy.

Many of these proposals are vague, presumably deliberately, though the drafters surely know the details. The ideas tend to match proposals that have been advanced by congressional Republicans in the past, and include some that were implemented by the first Trump administration and reversed or dropped by the Biden White House.

The main targets, moreover, are programs that the GOP has advocated paring back or eliminating for years, such as Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and food stamps. Cuts in some programs are described in the “menu” under misleading headings.

Proposals that would cut Medicaid benefits or eligibility for thousands of Americans are titled “Making Medicaid Work for the Most Vulnerable.” A sheaf of proposals to raise costs for Obamacare enrollees comes under the anodyne heading, “Reimagining the Affordable Care Act.”

Arrington hasn’t commented publicly on the leaked document. His committee hasn’t responded to my request for comment. But he has made his name as a budget hawk: “We ought to be able to unleash growth through tax cuts,” he told the Wall Street Journal after the November election, “and we ought to be able to bend the spending curve.”

How many of these proposals can actually be enacted by the current Congress is unclear, since the GOP majority is narrow in the Senate and razor-thin in the House. Some proposals could hit hard in states and districts represented by Republicans. But the theme of the proposals is unmistakable — safety net programs and several Biden initiatives are on the chopping block.

Let’s examine some of the lowlights:

—Medicaid: Hostility to this federal-state program, which provides healthcare for low-income households, is a Republican hobbyhorse.

The proposal would change Medicaid into a block-grant program that provides federal assistance to states based on their population. As I’ve reported in the past — including when Trump proposed the change during his first campaign for office — block grants are just budget cuts in disguise. They’re invariably aimed at antipoverty programs.

Block-granting Medicaid would sap states’ ability to respond to changing conditions driving up healthcare spending, such as the COVID pandemic. The committee asserts that this change would yield as much as $918 billion in savings over 10 years. That’s the equivalent of about 15% of the federal share of Medicaid spending — potentially a major hit to state budgets.

The committee also advocates paring back the federal share of Medicaid spending on enrollees signed up under the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, which brought childless low-income adults into the program, to the percentage paid under traditional Medicaid. The ACA set the federal share for Medicaid expansion at 90% of costs.

The federal share in traditional Medicaid averages about 69% but varies by state, from a minimum of about 60% to a maximum of 83%. So this change, which the committee pegs at a 10-year savings of $690 billion, would place a further strain on state budgets. The proposal also would reduce the federal share of Medicaid administrative expenses, set by law at no less than 50%.

The committee also advocates imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients. It claims that this would save $120 billion over a decade, but that could be achieved only by throwing thousands of enrollees out of the program. We know this because that’s exactly what happened when Arkansas tried it during the first Trump term.

The work rules did nothing to reduce joblessness, exacerbated a healthcare crisis, and raised administrative costs for the state. The Arkansas program was overturned by a federal judge, who also blocked other red states from proceeding. The Republican love for this policy despite ample evidence of its failure remains a mystery.

—Public assistance: Republican attacks on the most economically vulnerable Americans continue apace. The committee proposes reducing federal spending on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the federal-state program generally described as “welfare,” by 10%, to produce $15 billion in savings over a decade.

This is nothing but a cruel hit on America’s most desperate households. In no state do TANF benefits reach even 60% of the poverty level for a family of three. In 17 states — mostly those with large Black populations — they’re below 20% of the poverty level. In all but 11 states including California, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, TANF benefits were eroded by inflation between 1996 and 2023, sometimes by more than half.

A related proposal would reinstate the tightened standards for the “public charge” rule instituted in the first Trump term. This malevolent policy was aimed at immigrants by denying them entry or improvement in their immigration status if they were thought likely to access public assistance programs.

Trump added Medicaid and other noncash programs to the traditional roster of cash programs such as food stamps as signs the recipients would become a public charge.

As then-California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra noted at the time, the change was designed not only to throw millions of people out of public assistance programs, but also to have a chilling effect that would keep people who need healthcare and other help from seeking it. The Trump rule succeeded in doing so, according to an analysis by KFF; it was rescinded by Biden.

The menu lists “SNAP reforms” as the source of $22 billion in savings over a decade. It doesn’t specify the “reforms” sought in the food stmp program, but simple math suggests that they would involve either throwing people out of the program or reducing benefits, which currently average $6-$7 a day per person.

—The Biden Agenda: Other elements of the GOP menu take aim at key initiatives passed under Biden, including many that had bipartisan support.

It proposes dropping the green-energy provisions of the 2021 infrastructure bill, which included funding to modernize the nation’s public transit systems, building a national network of electric vehicle chargers and converting thousands of school buses to electric energy. The committee claims this would save $300 billion over 10 years, but since much of this spending is going to red states and conservative districts, rescinding it might be a tough lift for the GOP.

—The coming emergencies: The committee proposes to place restrictions on emergency spending — limiting the spending to the “recent average” to produce $500 billion in savings over a decade. This sounds like the elevation of hope over reality, since recent emergencies include not only the California fires, but tropical storms that leveled whole communities from Florida and Louisiana to Tennessee, North Carolina and Pennsylvania last year. Mother Nature, plainly, doesn’t pay much attention to budgetary posturing. Global warming is likely to raise the cost of emergency relief, not reduce it.

Politics as well as natural conditions will get in the way of these policies’ implementation. But it’s worth knowing what the Republicans aspire to achieve, and assessing their intentions.

Business

Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI after clash with Pentagon

Published

4 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI after clash with Pentagon

President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.

In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”

“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.

The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.

Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.

The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.

“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.

Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”

The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.

On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.

The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.

Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.

“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.

Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.

“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.

Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.

“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”

Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.

The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”

Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.

The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.

Business

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

Published

15 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Video: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

new video loaded: The Web of Companies Owned by Elon Musk

In mapping out Elon Musk’s wealth, our investigation found that Mr. Musk is behind more than 90 companies in Texas. Kirsten Grind, a New York Times Investigations reporter, explains what her team found.

By Kirsten Grind, Melanie Bencosme, James Surdam and Sean Havey

February 27, 2026

Business

Commentary: How Trump helped foreign markets outperform U.S. stocks during his first year in office

Published

16 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Commentary: How Trump helped foreign markets outperform U.S. stocks during his first year in office

Trump has crowed about the gains in the U.S. stock market during his term, but in 2025 investors saw more opportunity in the rest of the world.

If you’re a stock market investor you might be feeling pretty good about how your portfolio of U.S. equities fared in the first year of President Trump’s term.

All the major market indices seemed to be firing on all cylinders, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index gaining 17.9% through the full year.

But if you’re the type of investor who looks for things to regret, pay no attention to the rest of the world’s stock markets. That’s because overseas markets did better than the U.S. market in 2025 — a lot better. The MSCI World ex-USA index — that is, all the stock markets except the U.S. — gained more than 32% last year, nearly double the percentage gains of U.S. markets.

That’s a major departure from recent trends. Since 2013, the MSCI US index had bested the non-U.S. index every year except 2017 and 2022, sometimes by a wide margin — in 2024, for instance, the U.S. index gained 24.6%, while non-U.S. markets gained only 4.7%.

The Trump trade is dead. Long live the anti-Trump trade.

— Katie Martin, Financial Times

Broken down into individual country markets (also by MSCI indices), in 2025 the U.S. ranked 21st out of 23 developed markets, with only New Zealand and Denmark doing worse. Leading the pack were Austria and Spain, with 86% gains, but superior records were turned in by Finland, Ireland and Hong Kong, with gains of 50% or more; and the Netherlands, Norway, Britain and Japan, with gains of 40% or more.

Investment analysts cite several factors to explain this trend. Judging by traditional metrics such as price/earnings multiples, the U.S. markets have been much more expensive than those in the rest of the world. Indeed, they’re historically expensive. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index traded in 2025 at about 23 times expected corporate earnings; the historical average is 18 times earnings.

Investment managers also have become nervous about the concentration of market gains within the U.S. technology sector, especially in companies associated with artificial intelligence R&D. Fears that AI is an investment bubble that could take down the S&P’s highest fliers have investors looking elsewhere for returns.

But one factor recurs in almost all the market analyses tracking relative performance by U.S. and non-U.S. markets: Donald Trump.

Investors started 2025 with optimism about Trump’s influence on trading opportunities, given his apparent commitment to deregulation and his braggadocio about America’s dominant position in the world and his determination to preserve, even increase it.

That hasn’t been the case for months.

”The Trump trade is dead. Long live the anti-Trump trade,” Katie Martin of the Financial Times wrote this week. “Wherever you look in financial markets, you see signs that global investors are going out of their way to avoid Donald Trump’s America.”

Two Trump policy initiatives are commonly cited by wary investment experts. One, of course, is Trump’s on-and-off tariffs, which have left investors with little ability to assess international trade flows. The Supreme Court’s invalidation of most Trump tariffs and the bellicosity of his response, which included the immediate imposition of new 10% tariffs across the board and the threat to increase them to 15%, have done nothing to settle investors’ nerves.

Then there’s Trump’s driving down the value of the dollar through his agitation for lower interest rates, among other policies. For overseas investors, a weaker dollar makes U.S. assets more expensive relative to the outside world.

It would be one thing if trade flows and the dollar’s value reflected economic conditions that investors could themselves parse in creating a picture of investment opportunities. That’s not the case just now. “The current uncertainty is entirely man-made (largely by one orange-hued man in particular) but could well continue at least until the US mid-term elections in November,” Sam Burns of Mill Street Research wrote on Dec. 29.

Trump hasn’t been shy about trumpeting U.S. stock market gains as emblems of his policy wisdom. “The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election,” he said in his State of the Union address Tuesday. “Think of that, one year, boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts for the millions and the millions of Americans.”

Trump asserted: “Since I took office, the typical 401(k) balance is up by at least $30,000. That’s a lot of money. … Because the stock market has done so well, setting all those records, your 401(k)s are way up.”

Trump’s figure doesn’t conform to findings by retirement professionals such as the 401(k) overseers at Bank of America. They reported that the average account balance grew by only about $13,000 in 2025. I asked the White House for the source of Trump’s claim, but haven’t heard back.

Interpreting stock market returns as snapshots of the economy is a mug’s game. Despite that, at her recent appearance before a House committee, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi tried to deflect questions about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein records by crowing about it.

“The Dow is over 50,000 right now, she declared. “Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

I predicted that the administration would use the Dow industrial average’s break above 50,000 to assert that “the overall economy is firing on all cylinders, thanks to his policies.” The Dow reached that mark on Feb. 6. But Feb. 11, the day of Bondi’s testimony, was the last day the index closed above 50,000. On Thursday, it closed at 49,499.50, or about 1.4% below its Feb. 10 peak close of 50,188.14.

To use a metric suggested by economist Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan, if you invested $48,488 in the Dow on the day Trump took office last year, when the Dow closed at 48,448 points, you would have had $50,000 on Feb. 6. That’s a gain of about 3.2%. But if you had invested the same amount in the global stock market not including the U.S. (based on the MSCI World ex-USA index), on that same day you would have had nearly $60,000. That’s a gain of nearly 24%.

Broader market indices tell essentially the same story. From Jan. 17, 2025, the last day before Trump’s inauguration, through Thursday’s close, the MSCI US stock index gained a cumulative 16.3%. But the world index minus the U.S. gained nearly 42%.

The gulf between U.S. and non-U.S. performance has continued into the current year. The S&P 500 has gained about 0.74% this year through Wednesday, while the MSCI World ex-USA index has gained about 8.9%. That’s “the best start for a calendar year for global stocks relative to the S&P 500 going back to at least 1996,” Morningstar reports.

It wouldn’t be unusual for the discrepancy between the U.S. and global markets to shrink or even reverse itself over the course of this year.

That’s what happened in 2017, when overseas markets as tracked by MSCI beat the U.S. by more than three percentage points, and 2022, when global markets lost money but U.S. markets underperformed the rest of the world by more than five percentage points.

Economic conditions change, and often the stock markets march to their own drummers. The one thing less likely to change is that Trump is set to remain president until Jan. 20, 2029. Make your investment bets accordingly.