New Orleans       The embarrassing Health & Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. joined with the TV Doctor Oz who is now heading CMS, which runs Medicaid and Medicare, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the head of HUD, the department of housing and urban development, in a joint op-ed jeremiad demanding that as the headline roared: “If You Want Welfare, and Can Work, You Must.”   This must be the triumphant pinnacle of what we have long opposed as “workfare,” but it’s worse than that.  Their joint fabrication is a less than subtle effort to rebrand all parts of the US safety net as “welfare,” a freighted term that has been made into the equivalent of a hex on any social programs.  The fact that this is transparent doesn’t disguise its pernicious callousness.

Welfare has always been the life support for individuals and families in our rich country.  In everyone’s understanding, welfare is cash support so that those eligible can survive in America, even if barely.  Even before President Clinton gutted much of the federal support for such assistance in block grants to the state, allowing many to divert the funds or reduce support to even more miserly and miserable levels, welfare had become politically toxic and embattled state by state.  The myths about welfare are many, but the main one has always been that welfare supports the independent and able-bodied, allowing them to be paid without working.  None of this is true and most states never had programs to support general relief for unemployed single men and women, since the Great Depression.

Now in the new attack on social services and what little is left of the safety net in the United States, the Trump administration and these four horsemen and no small number of Republican Congressman are trying to pry dollars from the poor to distribute to the rich in continued tax breaks, and want to label all programs supporting food, health, and housing security as welfare in order to rationalize these latest restrictions and cutbacks.  They are arguing that there is justification in cutting the food stamp or SNAP program, Medicaid, which has expanded to provide more basic health protection for more Americans, and housing supports like Section 8 rental programs by gaslighting the public, including much of the hardcore MAGA base, by calling these programs “welfare” and claiming there are huge numbers of able-bodied workers benefiting from these programs.

I’ll save you the pain of having to hear from me about their fabricated statistics and the devious claims that their arguments are implicitly supported by former presidents Obama and Biden.  The budget proposal will take about 9 million people off of Medicaid alone.  The more onerous and difficult eligibility and certification programs they are instituting have been proven to reduce participation in programs drastically, not because they are ferreting out freeloaders, but because they are unilaterally muscling out fully eligible people with internet, paperwork, and other tricks of their scurrilous trade.

The huge number of working poor, or what some call ALICE families for Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed, are by definition working.  Sometimes they are working multiple jobs or gig and part-time jobs they are cobbling together.  Higher rents and grocery bills and minimal wages that have fallen behind costs year by year do not mean that a family getting food stamps or receiving Medicaid is not working, quite the contrary!

The changes being advocated based on bad numbers and biased ideology about work and workers will force even more Americans to suffer, live in misery, and die in an unforgiving economy where they are advocating for an equally cruel government.  These four men are not ashamed, but they should be, and when we see our neighbors and communities starved, homeless, and dying, we will all be ashamed for allowing this to happen.