Politics - News Analysis

‘Deep Cuts’ Coming in the New Trump Administration Likely to Hit Especially Hard For His Own Supporters

On today's episode of "FAFO," budget cuts

The long, long list of things that just aren’t going Trump voters’ way just keeps on getting longer. A new article from Reuters outlines the latest of these surprises for Trump supporters, and this one is a doozy.

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE (dōzh), has been tasked with finding massive cuts for America’s $6.2 trillion budget. Even though it’s not a real department, and the men in charge of it, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, are not elected officials, they’re also not stupid.

They going to find out quickly that 65% of the federal budget — just a hair under two out of every three dollars — goes to federal benefit programs, the rest largely accounted for by military spending and interest payments on American debt. The two men will have a hard time convincing either side of the aisle to cut military spending, and the interest payments are required by law, which means that any meaningful cuts are going to be felt by the beneficiaries of federal benefits programs.

What’s bad for Donald Trump and the Republicans is that the vast majority of people who get those benefits are Republican voters. So the people who voted for the leopards eating people’s faces party are about to get their faces eaten first.

Let me rephrase that a little more simply: The people who voted for Trump are about to get screwed by Trump. Specifically them, way more than anyone else.

For example, when it comes to Obamacare, a major expenditure in health care, more than 3 million people have already, as of the beginning of open enrollment, indicated that they intend to participate in the ACA in 2025. A full eighty-two percent of them live in states won by Trump in November.

Of the $310 billion the US spends on veterans’ benefits, a full sixty-three percent is spent in states won by Trump, the largest of which are Texas and Florida — two of the highest population red states in America.

Although Trump has, in name so far, ruled out budget cuts to Social Security and Medicare, if he does go after those programs as well, he can expect to affect an even more lopsided percentage of voters that pulled the lever for him in November.

Medicaid and SNAP will likely face cuts, which would primarily affect Democratic-leaning states. But of the conservative states that it will affect, like Louisiana, the residents are so much poorer than the poor in blue states that get those benefits that it will once again leave an outsized footprint on those that voted for Trump.

The Reuters report concludes that “[Most] federal spending doesn’t stay in Washington, and Musk and Ramaswamy are likely to face fierce pushback from across the country once they start floating specific cuts. The two aren’t ruling anything out at this point, but they could soon find their options to be more limited than they would prefer.”

Couple all of this with the fact that so many Trump-voting demographics have already felt unintended or unexpected effects from their November choices, and Trump could be in for a very rude awakening before even the middle of his final term in the White House.

But the people who will truly feel the negative outcomes will definitely be those who voted for Trump.

meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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