Trump didn't start the war on the poor – but he's taking it to new extremes

Al Jazeera

10-07-2025

'A budget is a moral document,' as numerous human rights activists have said over the decades. If that is true, then the so‑called 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' represents a grotesque example of the immorality of US leadership in 2025.
It is a budget that slashes Medicare and Medicaid by $930bn over the next decade and could leave as many as 17 million without healthcare insurance. The cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – a food aid scheme for Americans living in deep poverty – will render about 1 million vulnerable people ineligible for the basic human right of not starving. The US social welfare system – one that President Franklin D Roosevelt and Congress introduced with the Social Security Act of 1935 and President Lyndon B Johnson extended with Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 – is on its way to an emergency room.
This is one of the steepest rollbacks of social welfare programmes in the US since their inception in 1935. Many will attribute it to Project 2025. But the disdain for social welfare in the US has always been present – because the US cannot be the US without millions of Americans who must work on the cheap, so that a select few can hoard wealth and power, and mega-corporations can hoard resources.
That the US has had a mediocre and begrudging social welfare system for the past 90 years is nothing short of a miracle. While much of the Western world and other major empires either established or modernised their social welfare systems in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the US persisted with limited government intervention for citizens. Only radicals within the US labour movement typically advocated a national social welfare policy. Until the Great Depression of the 1930s, only individual states – not the federal government – provided limited economic relief to unemployed people or their families.
US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins played a critical role in persuading Roosevelt to pursue what would become the Social Security Act of 1935. Once enacted, this provided the elderly, the unemployed, disabled workers, and single mothers with federal assistance for the first time. But both of the bill's champions were aware that there would be opposition to the federal government assuming responsibility for providing benefits to Americans, even with unemployment at 25 percent.
Leading business tycoons such as Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford expressed their disdain for federal social welfare. 'No government can guarantee security. It can only tax production, distribution, and service and gradually crush the poor to pay taxes,' Ford said. Alf Landon, a millionaire oilman who served as Republican governor of Kansas and ran against Roosevelt in 1936, also opposed the Social Security Act, on the grounds that the tax burden would further impoverish workers. 'I am not exaggerating the folly of this legislation. The saving it forces on our workers is a cruel hoax,' Landon stated in a 1936 speech, also fearing that the federal government would eventually dip into Social Security funds to pay for other projects.
Even when Congress enacted the Social Security Act in August 1935, the compromises made served to racialise, feminise, and further limit social welfare provision. The bill excluded agricultural workers like sharecroppers (two‑thirds white and one‑third African American, who were overrepresented in this work), domestic workers (in which Black women were overrepresented), nonprofit and government workers, and some waiters and waitresses from welfare benefits. It took amendments in the 1950s to rectify some of the racial, gender, and class discrimination embedded in the original legislation.
Johnson's War on Poverty in 1964-65 prompted resistance and helped catalyse a new conservative movement. Johnson sought to add Medicare and Medicaid to the Social Security regime, provide food assistance via programmes such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and SNAP (originally Food Stamps), and expand Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Republican and future US President George HW Bush ran unsuccessfully for Senate in Texas in 1964 against a pro‑Medicare Democrat, calling Johnson's plan 'socialised medicine' – a Cold War‑era slur equating it with communism. Racial segregationist Strom Thurmond remarked of social welfare programmes, in general – and Johnson's Medicare and Medicaid plans, specifically – 'You had [the poor] back in the days of Jesus Christ, you have got some now, and you will have some in the future,' a pitiful excuse for refusing to reduce poverty or extend federal assistance.
The entire conservative pushback against what Republicans termed 'entitlements' grew from the expansion of the welfare state under Johnson. So much so that when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, 'his administration slashed Medicaid expenditures by more than 18 percent and cut the overall Department of Health and Human Services budget by 25 percent'. Those and other austerity measures in the 1980s resulted in one million fewer children eligible for free or reduced‑price school lunches, 600,000 fewer people on Medicaid, and one million fewer accessing SNAP – according to one study.
I can speak to the effect of such cuts directly. As a teenage recipient of AFDC and SNAP during the Reagan years – the second eldest of six children (four under the age of five in 1984) in the New York City area – I can say that the $16,000 in annual state and federal assistance between 1983 and 1987 felt like a cruel joke. It barely covered housing, offered minimal healthcare via underfunded public clinics, and still left us without food for a week every month. If this is what they call 'entitlements', then I was clearly entitled to almost nothing.
In the past 30 years, leaders who opposed the federal social welfare apparatus have celebrated their victories with disturbing heartlessness. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole declared gleefully in 1995 that he 'was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare… because we knew it wouldn't work in 1965'. During his 2008 presidential campaign, the late Republican senator John McCain proposed $1.3 trillion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, along with a huge 'overhaul' of Social Security to balance the federal budget. Fiscal conservative Grover Norquist infamously said he wanted to 'get it [social‑welfare programmes] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub'. US Speaker Mike Johnson claimed last week that Trump's budget would usher in 'a new golden age'. Budget priorities that ultimately harm those in poverty, restrict access to healthcare, and force people to work for food aid or medical care are nothing short of monstrous.
Ninety years – and 44 years of tax breaks later – the greed and callousness of conservatives and the far right have precipitated yet another round of tax cuts favouring the uber wealthy and mega-corporations. It is only a matter of time before those whose grandparents once benefitted from Social Security and New Deal‑era welfare will seek to gut what remains of America's Swiss‑cheese safety net.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.