Sure, the GOP budget will kill people, but that's the price of beating the libs
For New York's 1.8 million LIHEAP energy assistance families, you get nothing.
The GOP’s “skinny budget” for 2026 has taken Elon Musk’s chainsaw analogy and made it real. It deletes $163 billion from federal non-defense discretionary spending. That’s a 22.6 percent cut. It’s going to hurt. People will likely die. Meanwhile, defense spending could increase 13 percent, or $119 billion, bringing the defense budget to an eye-popping $1.01 trillion. More people will die.
Here’s a brief litany of cuts in the budget proposal, and if you have your “libs” bingo card out, see if you can figure out the pattern.
Medicaid: $880 billion over 10 years, which the CBO estimates could mean between 2.3 and 8.6 million Americans losing Medicaid coverage.
NIH: $1.8 billion. Termination of 694 medical research grants, with special focus on anything dealing with LGBTQ+ health, COVID-19, and vaccine resistance.
CDC: $11 billion, mostly to vaccine programs aimed at children.
Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP): gone. This especially affects low-income New Yorkers, 1.8 million of whom will lose their public assistance with energy bills. Most of those families live in counties outside the NYC area (though Westchester County has about 34,000 families on LIHEAP).
SNAP (school lunches): the proposal would shift some funding to states, add work requirements for recipients, or limit benefits.
HIV/AIDS, 988 mental health helpline: the Ryan White program that pays for LBGTQ+ youth services will be cut. Global health programs operated as foreign aid would also be cut.
Department of Education: $12 billion. Eliminates the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant and the Federal Work-Study. Head Start may also be on the chopping block.
AmeriCorps: gone.
Institute of Museum and Library Services: gone.
National Endowment for the Arts: gone.
National Endowment for the Humanities: gone.
USAID: broken up and absorbed by the State Department.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance: grant terminated.
Housing and Urban Development: 44 percent budget cut.
Department of Justice Grants: 40 programs dealing with structural racism and LGBTQ+ advocacy eliminated.
EPA: an unspecified haircut.
Department of Energy: undoing Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, whatever hasn’t been spent. Rolling back renewable energy projects, grants, and initiatives.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting: gone. (PBS and NPR will not get funding.)
Do you see the pattern here? Anything that “the libs” control or have socially taken over is being cut. Special programs for LBGTQ+, entitlements, things smacking of globalism, arts, the educational and healthcare culture, and intersectional anti-racist teaching is out the door. And special attention and prejudice is given to New York and New Yorkers, who convicted Donald Trump of 22 felonies. Mass punishment is back on the menu, boys!
The budget, if adopted, would undo many years of regulatory and cultural capture of institutions and government agencies by liberal people and their pet causes. I am not against some of these programs being eliminated, but the price of doing it so bluntly and violently is not worth the benefit from having those programs gone.
Eliminating LIHEAP in New York will kill people. In the wintertime, people without heat will freeze to death. Not people in Manhattan, or Brooklyn, or Queens. People in the north part of the state. The elderly. The poor. Mind you, there won’t be millions dead, but there won’t be zero either.
Getting rid of SNAP will make children go hungry. Some school districts don’t have a lot of money, because the residents of those districts don’t earn a lot of money, and don’t have expensive properties to pay property taxes that fund schools. The schools will run out of lunches and breakfasts, and kids will go hungry, unless charities step up.
Talk radio and good documentary television will suffer. Sure, NPR and PBS tend to be more liberal, but their listeners and purveyors of their programming tend to be more liberal (or at least centrist). Anything “highbrow” is suspect to the lowbrows running the Trump budget. By lowbrow I don’t mean stupid. Elon Musk is far from stupid, but he is skeptical of things that others of similar education find wholesome and good.
Children will die of dread diseases that we should have eliminated permanently. Parents will follow the non-advice of our shuttered federal programs and not get their kids properly vaccinated. I’m not talking about HPV or even COVID or flu shots. I’m talking about the MMR vaccines that stop measles. We might even see the resurgence of the iron lung if polio returns. These diseases weren’t removed forever; they have been held at bay by herd immunity. If 10 percent of parents decide to forego vaccinations, then the other 90 percent is in danger, because no vaccine is 100 percent effective. Children will get the diseases, even if they are vaccinated, because they’ll catch it from the unvaccinated children. This isn’t speculation, it’s science.
Energy program like new technology molten salt reactors will lose funding and stop. A lot of “big science” and basic research done by universities will stop. The best and brightest will be snapped up by companies, doing for-profit work, or by Chinese companies, doing work for China.
The DOD will continue its wasteful ways, and can spend $119 billion in its sleep. Big defense programs, without a war to fight or a goal in mind, tend to consume large amounts of cash with little to show for it. We have precisely three Zumwalt class destroyers, and no more will ever be built (for a reason!). Big ships, new aircraft, new missiles, energy directed weapons, better satellites, drones, and AI-powered autonomous vehicles are nice toys. But our military already has lots and lots of toys sitting in big warehouses. I say build more F-35s, and re-open the F-22 line. Replace the B-52, not with the B-2 though.
The cuts in the new budget will cost jobs, make life harder for poor people, and do nothing to help them get out of a cycle of poverty, poor health and poor education. The very voters about whom Trump said “I AM YOUR VOICE” are getting the shaft with this budget. But the purpose of the budget is to stick it to the libs. Those voters are merely collateral damage.
I have no clue whether the budget will actually pass. Democrats and certain Republicans are against it, but I have stopped believing that anyone will stop things Trump wants, because his way of pressuring people in Congress seems to be effective. There’s an excellent chance he will get what he wants, but I may be wrong.
There is a way to scale back things “the libs” have converted into their pet programs and pork barrel virtue signals. But the chainsaw is not the best way. The chainsaw cuts off good limbs with the dead ones. Pruning and taking care to not do damage is not the way this administration operates. Mostly it is fueled by pure rage and revenge. That makes me sad.
About Pope Leo XIV, aka “Pope Bob.” I don’t have much to say. I am not a Roman Catholic and have never been one. I don’t know their mysterious rites and rituals. I believe Catholics are Christians, and accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and therefore the leader of that group commands respect. I pray God’s favor, direction, and the power and truth of the Holy Spirit on Pope Leo XIV, and as an American, I hope he brings some special insight to the Holy See of our country. Perhaps Chicago style pizza will now be on the Vatican menu. We can only hope.
SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS: You can follow us on social media at several different locations. Official Racket News pages include:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsRacket
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/NewsRacket
Mastodon: https://federated.press/@RacketNews
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@theracketnews
David: https://www.threads.net/@captainkudzu71
Steve: https://www.threads.net/@stevengberman
Our personal accounts on the platform formerly known as Twitter:
David: https://twitter.com/captainkudzu
Steve: https://twitter.com/stevengberman
Jay: https://twitter.com/curmudgeon_NH
Thanks again for subscribing! Don’t forget to share us with your friends!
I love your writing. Have some disagreement with a lot of these takes.
I’ll take exception to your takes on Defense Spending. DoD sure can spend that, but they have made a recent concerted effort for “meaningful acquisition.” Trump didn’t invent it but he has continued and increased it. “Storing endless kit in warehouses?” Just stop, man. I could make pointed retorts, but I like you (seriously). So just stop the dumb statements.
“People will die.” Yes, yes they will. But the government’s job isn’t to “prevent all deaths”. As a comparison, Ford and Toyoya will “cause deaths” because they made trade offs between mass-affordable cars and safety. This admin is changing some of the trade offs. That isn’t Hitler-adjacent.
The cuts only look like they “own the libs” because they were done to politically focused carve-outs. A lot of these programs might have fared better had they not internally morphed into outright political theater. Ref A: NPR CEO.
Steven, wow, where to begin. Your bleeding heart doesn't impress me. Let's start here, I'm sure many billions could be cut out of defense, so we have some common ground there. Having said that, you might want to reread the 10th amendment. Many of these programs administered by the federal government are ones that should be handled by the states. The federal government shouldn't be involved, period. Charitable programs work best at the state and local levels anyway. And we can agree that churches need to step into any vacuums that might result. I believe that many of them have abrogated their responsibility to care for the poor and downtrodden. As well private citizens should become better Samaritans as well. After all, we should take care of our fellow man. Now, I say all that to say this, we, as Americans have allowed what should be on us to be pushed off on a federal government that we have seen over the years is completely ill-equipped to handle it. Maybe I can be persuaded that we shouldn't take a chain saw to everything. A scalpel perhaps?