The Democratic Party could spell this out clearly and consistently for voters.
This article was originally published by The American Prospect.
The humanitarian aid cuts illegally imposed by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been devastating across the globe. The Prospect’s Ryan Cooper has described how DOGE’s withdrawal of funding for nutritional support, tuberculosis treatment, malaria prevention, and PEPFAR—the HIV prevention program that was perhaps the only good thing George W. Bush did—amounts to a “disease holocaust” likely to kill millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.
If it hasn’t already, DOGE’s onslaught against the federal workforce—composed of millions of workers in every state—will soon be responsible for the premature deaths of people throughout the United States, too. The problem with this, as in politics more broadly, is that someone must tell the public who’s responsible; they won’t always figure it out on their own.
Last weekend’s deadly spate of extreme weather is among the latest examples of how Trump and Musk are putting millions of Americans in harm’s way. Dozens of people across the Midwest and South were killed by a combination of tornadoes, dust storms, and wildfires between Friday and Sunday. This carnage unfolded just days after Trump and Musk pushed out more than a thousand National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees at the start of peak tornado season, including meteorologists who provide forecasts in National Weather Service (NWS) offices around the country.
On March 12, two days before the chaotic weather began, the Associated Press reported that following a fresh round of cuts, NOAA will have eliminated roughly 1 in 4 jobs since Trump’s inauguration. In the words of former NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad, “There is no way to make these kinds of cuts without removing or strongly compromising mission capabilities.” “People are going to start seeing this very quickly,” warned former NOAA chief scientist Craig McLean.
Early indications are that a last-minute appeal from Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) helped keep open an NWS office in Norman, Oklahoma, which is why that facility issued lifesaving warnings about the storms. Had Cole’s request been ignored, the death toll would almost certainly have been higher. What about other NWS centers? Were they spared?
According to Inside Climate News, the NWS issued “more than 250 tornado warnings in less than 72 hours,” suggesting that many local offices remained operational. Nevertheless, “NOAA’s own website suggests that some functions of the agency have already been affected by the administration’s actions,” ICN reported Monday. On Tuesday, the NWS website acknowledged “nation-wide internet and communications issues,” stating that “you may not be able to access products on our webpages, or these products will be old.”
What’s indisputable is that Trump and Musk’s ongoing assault on scientific knowledge and already understaffed federal agencies will exacerbate death and destruction in the future. Dismantling NOAA, the agency tasked with monitoring and warning the public about storms, and shrinking the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for coordinating disaster responses, will needlessly worsen mortality and hardship. There will be more tornadoes, and official wildfire and hurricane seasons are quickly approaching. Virtually every form of extreme weather is growing in frequency, severity, and duration due to planet-heating pollution, which is set to increase further thanks to the Trump administration’s embrace of even more fossil fuel production.
These agencies, like others, are being unlawfully defunded in a bid to justify privatization. Before Musk and other rentiers seize public assets, they’re deliberately breaking them to “prove” the right-wing myth of public-sector ineptitude. That’s the kind of thing a fighting Democratic Party could politicize.
By politicize, I mean communicating to the public how DOGE’s frenzied “cost-cutting” is not only anti-democratic, but jeopardizes public health and safety. In other words, Democrats need to explain how DOGE is generating an escalation in entirely preventable suffering.
There are in fact dozens of compelling examples of DOGE-induced hazards and harms with lethal consequences. Trump and Musk’s attack on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is hindering government scientists from finding a cure for your mother’s illness. Trump and Musk are terminating food inspectors and disbanding food safety advisory committees in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), meaning more contaminants in our food supply courtesy of Big Ag. Trump and Musk’s job cuts are destabilizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), making it riskier to fly unless you’re in one of Trump or Musk’s private jets.
Some may complain that we can’t yet definitively prove that Trump and Musk’s actions are begetting specific outcomes. But we have seen the consequences of destroying government for decades. There are plenty of ways to point out everything the dangerous duo did in the days preceding a given calamity, and warn of similar injuries that the right’s indiscriminate “chain saw” approach to government is likely to produce moving forward. It’s about drawing attention to the myriad threats posed by DOGE. We can connect DOGE’s decimation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the suppression of influenza vaccine research at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the next flu season, just as we can connect these recent deadly storms to the upcoming hurricane and wildfire seasons.
We should not assume that voters will automatically and independently understand cause and effect. It’s the job of an energetic opposition party to connect the dots between, say, DOGE’s neutering of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a lack of enforcement of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and a subsequent rise in cases of asthma and lead poisoning. Democrats need to draw a straight line between Trump and Musk’s epidemiologically reckless policies and an eventual bird flu pandemic.
It’s the job of an energetic opposition to explain the chain of events between Trump and Musk slashing the workforce at the Bureau of Reclamation, which supplies water and hydropower in 17 Western states, and any catastrophic events stemming from that. When there’s a heatwave (like the one that killed hundreds of people in the Pacific Northwest in June 2021) and people perish because air conditioners stop working amid electricity disruptions: DOGE did that. If a community is flooded or crops wither due to a lack of timely water provision to farmers: DOGE did that.
In the absence of effective communication, the public won’t interpret DOGE’s raiding of the civil service as the source of their mounting troubles. That’s especially true when it comes to less visible aspects of the government that were poorly understood by the public beforehand, from NOAA’s indispensable weather forecasting to NIH’s seeding of medical breakthroughs, including the mRNA technology that is (or was?) poised to revolutionize cancer treatment.
Finally, it’s crucial to note that because poverty and inequality are major killers, it follows that DOGE’s bulldozing of the social safety net will compound economic immiseration and, by extension, avoidable deaths.
The ruling class has been trying to destroy this country’s underdeveloped welfare state since before FDR’s ink was dry. Now, a far-right unelected billionaire is on the verge of possibly ruining (and privatizing) the biggest social insurance accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society eras: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The retrenchment of those programs, along with reductions in the provision of nutrition, housing, and other forms of vital assistance, will lead to more hunger, more homelessness, more abandonment and, yes, more deaths.
Ultimately, Trump and Musk’s shredding of the state’s administrative, regulatory, and redistributive arms ought to be so thoroughly scrutinized and criticized that people remember the names of the “DOGE victims” who died needlessly at the hands of our dystopian duo.
Sitting and waiting for Trump and Musk’s malevolent actions to provoke a backlash is a dead end. If Democrats have any hope of reversing their precipitous decline in popularity, they need to passionately get across to voters how Trump and Musk’s war on the public good is endangering their material well-being.