The Politics of Abandonment: An Inquiry into Austerity, Devaluation, and the Unspoken Agenda of Social Program Retrenchment in the United States

With AI Assistance

Introduction

This report addresses the premise that the systematic and severe cuts to foundational social programs in the United States—including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Social Security, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—are not merely fiscal adjustments but represent a deliberate agenda with foreseeable, life-threatening consequences for millions of Americans. The analysis will not seek to prove a conspiratorial intent but will instead examine whether the material outcomes of these policies align with the functional effects of a "slow mass extermination" of populations that have been discursively framed as unproductive or undesirable.

The inquiry proceeds through a multi-layered analytical framework. First, it undertakes a detailed deconstruction of the proposed policies, primarily as consolidated within the legislative package known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (OBBBA), using data from non-partisan bodies like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and independent research organizations. Second, it scrutinizes the ideological justifications provided by the architects of these policies, particularly conservative think tanks, contrasting their public rhetoric with the quantifiable results of their proposals. Third, it projects the human cost of these cuts in terms of health, nutrition, and mortality, drawing on extensive academic and public health research. Finally, it applies established sociological and political theories—including austerity, biopower, and necropolitics—to interpret the underlying logic and potential "unspoken truth" of this political project.

The central hypothesis tested throughout this report is that these policies, irrespective of their stated intent, function as a mechanism for managing and ultimately abandoning populations deemed economically non-essential. This process systematically increases precarity, morbidity, and premature death, raising profound questions about the nature of the American social contract and the state's obligations to its most vulnerable citizens.

Part I: The Architecture of Retrenchment: Deconstructing the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" and its Ideological Underpinnings

The proposed cuts to the American social safety net are not piecemeal adjustments driven by fiscal necessity. They are part of a coordinated, systematic effort to dismantle the core functions of social support, primarily advanced through a single, sweeping legislative vehicle. This section establishes the factual basis of this retrenchment, contrasting the public rationale of fiscal prudence and self-sufficiency with the demonstrable material outcome of a massive upward redistribution of wealth.

Section 1.1: A Systematic Dismantling of the Social Safety Net

The primary legislative instrument for this agenda is the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," a sprawling package of over 940 pages that combines massive tax cuts with unprecedented spending reductions.¹ Despite rhetoric concerning fiscal responsibility, the CBO estimates the House version of the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit, while the more aggressive Senate version would add nearly $3.3 trillion.³ This reveals that deficit reduction is not the primary goal; rather, the cuts serve to finance other priorities.

Medicaid: The Largest Cuts in History

The assault on Medicaid, which provides health coverage to more than one in five Americans, is historic in its scale and scope.⁵ The OBBBA proposes a federal spending reduction of a staggering

$793 billion over ten years, representing a 12% cut to federal funding for the program.⁶ These savings are not achieved through efficiency measures but through mechanisms explicitly designed to remove people from coverage:

• Punitive Work Requirements: The bill imposes stringent work "reporting" requirements of 80 hours per month on many adults up to age 65.¹ Decades of evidence show these are not work incentives but complex bureaucratic hurdles that cause even eligible individuals who are working or exempt to lose coverage due to paperwork errors or administrative churn.⁵ The CBO projects this provision alone will cause
  5.2 million people to lose their health coverage.⁸

• The "Double Punishment" Clause: In a particularly punitive design, the plan would bar individuals who lose Medicaid through these reporting requirements from accessing ACA marketplace subsidies.⁵ This creates a "coverage cliff" with no alternative, effectively sentencing those who cannot navigate the red tape to be uninsured. This structure is inconsistent with a goal of empowerment and perfectly consistent with a goal of exclusion, ensuring that those who fall out of the system have no safety net to catch them.

• Cost-Sharing Barriers: The bill mandates new federal minimum out-of-pocket costs and co-payments for Medicaid recipients.¹ Extensive research demonstrates that even nominal cost-sharing requirements of $1 to $5 can act as a significant deterrent, preventing low-income individuals from seeking necessary medical care.⁵

• Attacks on ACA Expansion: The Senate version of the bill includes amendments to rapidly phase down the enhanced federal matching rate for the ACA's Medicaid expansion.⁹ This would shift billions in costs to states, and in at least nine states with "trigger laws," it would automatically terminate the expansion, stripping coverage from nearly 2 million people almost overnight.⁹

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): Engineering Hunger

The plan for SNAP, the nation's primary defense against hunger, is equally severe. The House proposal would cut the program by over $290 billion—a nearly 30% reduction and the largest in its history.⁵ This is achieved through several mechanisms:

• Cost-Shifting to States: The plan fundamentally reworks SNAP by shifting a significant portion of benefit costs to states, which currently bear only administrative costs.⁵ This would force states into an impossible choice between funding food aid or other essential services like education and public safety, particularly during recessions when the need for SNAP rises.⁵

• Eroding Benefit Adequacy: The proposals would rescind the 2021 update to the Thrifty Food Plan, which adjusted SNAP benefits to reflect the actual cost of a healthy, modern diet for the first time in decades.¹⁰ It would also block future administrations from making similar adjustments, locking in a lower benefit level and allowing its real value to be slowly but surely eroded by inflation over time.⁵

• Targeting Children and Seniors: The ideological blueprint for these cuts, Project 2025, explicitly calls for eliminating summer food assistance programs that benefit an estimated 21 million children and gutting community eligibility provisions that allow high-poverty schools to provide free meals to all students, a program serving nearly 20 million children.¹⁰

Social Security and Other Programs: A Broad-Based Assault

The retrenchment extends far beyond health and nutrition to the foundational pillars of retirement security and basic social support.

• Raising the Retirement Age: The Republican Study Committee (RSC) budget, representing a majority of House Republicans, and Project 2025 both call for raising the Social Security full retirement age to 69 or 70.¹¹ The CBO confirms this is a direct and substantial benefit cut, slashing lifetime benefits by an average of 13% to 20% for future retirees.¹¹ This change disproportionately harms low-income workers and those in physically demanding jobs who are less able to extend their working lives.¹²

• Privatization Agenda: Behind these cuts lies a decades-long ideological project by groups like The Heritage Foundation to dismantle Social Security as a social insurance program and replace it with a system of privatized "personal retirement accounts." This would siphon funds from the collective trust fund, weaken the system's finances, and expose individuals to market risk.¹⁴

• Comprehensive Retrenchment: The cuts are pervasive, affecting nearly every program that supports low- and middle-income families. Proposals include deep reductions in funding for housing assistance, child care (Child Care and Development Block Grant and Head Start), K-12 education in low-income communities, job training programs, and worker protection agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).¹⁶

Table 1: Summary of Major Social Program Cuts in Recent Republican Proposals

Program

Medicaid & CHIP

SNAP (Food Stamps)

Social Security

ACA Marketplace Subsidies

Child Support Programs

Housing & Labor

Section 1.2: The Ideological Rationale vs. The Material Outcome

The intellectual architects of this agenda, based in conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), provide a public-facing rationale centered on a specific moral and economic philosophy. They argue that welfare programs create a "culture of dependency," trapping recipients in poverty by disincentivizing work and marriage.¹⁹ The proposed solution is to impose "reciprocal obligations" like work requirements and to shift costs to states to promote "efficiency".²¹ Simultaneously, proponents claim the massive tax cuts in the OBBBA will unleash "historic prosperity" that will benefit all Americans.²⁴

This public rationale is systematically refuted by the non-partisan analysis of the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO's distributional analysis of the OBBBA reveals its true function: a massive upward redistribution of wealth. The policy is not designed to lift people out of poverty but to redirect resources from the most vulnerable to the most affluent.

The CBO finds that the bill would cause households in the lowest income decile to lose an average of $1,600 per year, a nearly 4% reduction in their already meager income. In stark contrast, households in the highest income decile would see their resources increase by an average of $12,000 per year.¹ The trillions of dollars in "savings" generated by cutting food, health, and housing assistance for the poor and working class are used to finance permanent tax cuts for wealthy heirs and corporations, alongside massive spending increases for a border wall and deportation forces.¹

Table 2: CBO Distributional Analysis of the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act'

Household Income Decile

Lowest

Second

Third

Fourth

Fifth

Sixth

Seventh

Eighth

Ninth

Highest

Source: Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House-passed OBBBA ²⁵

Part II: The Tangible Consequences: Projecting the Human Cost

The abstract budget numbers and policy mechanisms detailed above translate into concrete, life-altering, and often lethal consequences. This section quantifies the foreseeable human cost of the proposed retrenchment, demonstrating that widespread increases in mortality, disease, and malnutrition are not speculative side effects but predictable outcomes of the policy design.

Section 2.1: Mortality, Morbidity, and Mass Uninsurance

The most immediate impact of the OBBBA would be a dramatic increase in the number of uninsured Americans. The CBO projects the bill will cause 10.9 million people to become uninsured by 2034, with 7.8 million of those losses stemming directly from the Medicaid cuts.³ When accounting for the expiration of other ACA subsidies, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimates the total increase in the uninsured could reach

16 million people.²⁷

This loss of coverage has lethal consequences. A vast body of academic literature links austerity policies to negative health outcomes. Studies show that austerity measures, through public sector job cuts and reductions in social spending, directly increase unemployment, poverty, and homelessness—all of which are strong predictors of depression, suicide, and premature mortality.²⁸ Cuts to healthcare funding and the imposition of user fees, as proposed in the OBBBA, lead to a documented rise in "self-reported unmet medical need," where individuals forgo necessary care due to cost, a trend that disproportionately harms the poor and sick.²⁸ A United Nations report explicitly connects such austerity measures to the violation of the fundamental right to health and the weakening of safety nets that protect the vulnerable.²⁹

Given that millions of people will lose their health insurance, it is foreseeable that thousands will die preventable deaths each year from untreated chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, delayed cancer diagnoses, and lack of access to life-saving medications and procedures.

Section 2.2: The Specter of Mass Malnutrition and its Societal Costs

The deep cuts to SNAP are designed to engineer a rise in food insecurity, which already affects 30% of Medicaid enrollees and 26% of the uninsured.¹⁸ For millions of families, the simultaneous loss of both food assistance and health coverage would create a synergistic crisis, forcing impossible choices between eating and seeking medical care.¹⁸

This engineered malnutrition is not only a humanitarian catastrophe but also a direct assault on the nation's long-term human capital and economic future. The connection between nutrition and productivity is well-established:

• Globally, malnutrition is estimated to cost the world economy $3.5 trillion annually.³⁰ It robs countries of their "gray matter infrastructure" by permanently stunting child brain development.³⁰

• Research shows that a 1% loss in adult height due to childhood stunting is associated with a 1.4% loss in economic productivity, and adults who were stunted as children earn almost 20% less over their lifetimes.³⁰

• Even before these proposed cuts, the direct health care and special education costs associated with food insecurity among young children in the U.S. were estimated at over $1.2 billion annually (in 2015 dollars)—a figure that only covers children aged four and under.³³

The policy of cutting nutrition assistance is, therefore, a policy of actively undermining the future health, intelligence, and productivity of the American workforce. It creates a downward spiral where engineered malnutrition makes people sicker and less able to work, while engineered uninsurance prevents them from getting care for the very conditions the malnutrition exacerbates. This is not an unintended consequence; it is the direct, predictable outcome of attacking both food and health security simultaneously.

Section 2.3: Compounding Vulnerabilities in Targeted Populations

While the impact of these cuts is broad, it is surgically targeted at the nation's most vulnerable populations, compounding their precarity.

• Rural America: Rural communities, which often have older, sicker, and poorer populations, will be devastated. KFF projects a $119 billion reduction in federal Medicaid spending in rural areas, leading to 1.5 million rural residents losing their health coverage.⁷ This immense financial pressure will accelerate the closure of rural hospitals, which are often the largest employers in their communities, creating healthcare deserts and economic collapse.⁷

• Seniors and People with Disabilities: The agenda is particularly cruel to the elderly and those with disabilities. Raising the Social Security retirement age, gutting Supplemental Security Income (SSI), reducing Medicaid funding for long-term care, and repealing the Nursing Home Minimum Staffing Rule are all policies that directly threaten the financial stability and physical safety of the nation's most frail citizens.¹⁰ For shut-in seniors, cuts to programs like Meals on Wheels remove not only a vital source of nutrition but often their only point of human contact.

• Children: The proposals are uniquely punitive toward children. The ideological frameworks guiding the cuts explicitly target summer food programs, free school meals, the early childhood education program Head Start, and the Child Tax Credit for families with an undocumented parent—all measures that directly punish children for the circumstances of their birth.⁵

Part III: The Discursive Framing: From "Dependency" to Necropolitics

The implementation of policies with such foreseeably devastating consequences is made politically possible only through a sophisticated ideological and rhetorical apparatus. The language used by the policies' proponents is not incidental; it is central to a process of dehumanization that recasts victims as perpetrators and justifies the state's abandonment of its citizens.

Section 3.1: The Genealogy of Dehumanizing Language

The term "useless eaters," with its origins in Nazi propaganda used to justify the murder of disabled people, represents the historical nadir of language that frames certain human lives as devoid of value and a drain on the state.³⁵ While this exact phrase is not found in the contemporary mainstream discourse, its function is replicated through more sanitized, economically-coded terminology.

Modern political rhetoric achieves a similar dehumanizing effect through the persistent use of frameworks like "makers vs. takers" and the "culture of dependency."

• The "makers vs. takers" narrative, a staple of modern conservative and libertarian thought, cleaves society into two opposing classes: a productive, hardworking class of "makers" and a parasitic, lazy class of "takers" who live off their labor.³⁷ Within this frame, welfare recipients are recast not as citizens experiencing hardship but as "looters," "moochers," and "free riders".³⁷

• Politicians consistently rail against a "bloated welfare state" that supposedly fosters a "culture of dependency".¹⁹ This rhetoric, which invokes images of "welfare queens" gaming the system, stigmatizes poverty by shifting the blame from structural economic factors—such as low wages or lack of jobs—to the purported moral failings of the poor themselves.⁴⁰

This process of discursive dehumanization is a necessary precondition for enacting cruel policies. By framing the poor as undeserving, the policies that harm them can be reframed as tough-love measures designed to "help" them by forcing self-reliance. This rhetoric provides the moral and political justification needed to advance an agenda that would otherwise be politically toxic. For example, a policy that takes $1,600 from the poorest families to give $12,000 to the richest is difficult to sell on its merits.²⁵ However, when filtered through the "makers vs. takers" lens, it becomes a moral crusade to reward the productive and discipline the indolent. The rhetoric and the policy thus exist in a symbiotic relationship: the dehumanizing language makes the policy palatable, and the policy's harsh effects reinforce the narrative that its victims are failures, justifying further retrenchment.

Section 3.2: Austerity as a Political Technology

Critical analysis of austerity reveals that it is not a sound economic recovery strategy. On the contrary, studies by institutions like the International Monetary Fund have shown that austerity measures implemented during economic downturns deepen recessions, suppress growth, and worsen social welfare.⁴³ As one analysis concludes, austerity has "failed miserably" wherever it has been implemented as a solution to financial crisis.⁴⁴

The true function of austerity is political, not economic. It is a technology for "socializing the crisis," which means transferring the costs of failures in the private sector (such as the 2008 financial crisis) onto the public, particularly onto pensioners, welfare recipients, and public sector workers.⁴⁴ Austerity serves to discipline populations, reassert the power of financial capital over the state, and enforce a brutal class hierarchy.⁴⁴ The OBBBA, which pairs devastating cuts for the poor with lavish tax breaks for the wealthy, is a textbook example of austerity being used as a tool of class warfare under the guise of fiscal policy.⁵

Section 3.3: From Biopower to Necropolitics: Theorizing the Agenda of "Letting Die"

To fully grasp the agenda, it is useful to employ concepts from political theory. The 20th-century welfare state can be understood through Michel Foucault's concept of biopower: the collection of mechanisms through which a modern state manages the health, life, and well-being of its population to foster a productive and healthy workforce essential for a capitalist economy.⁴⁶ Programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and Social Security are primary instruments of this biopower, designed to regulate and sustain the life of the population.

However, the policies of extreme retrenchment signal a shift toward what philosopher Achille Mbembe has termed necropolitics: the power of the sovereign to dictate who may live and who must die.⁴⁷ This power is not always exercised through active, direct killing. It can manifest as a politics of "letting die"—the administrative and political decision to withdraw life-sustaining resources from certain populations, exposing them to the risk of premature death.⁴⁸

Austerity, when applied in this manner, becomes a form of necropolitical governance. The systematic dismantling of healthcare, nutrition, and income support for populations that have been discursively framed as "useless," "dependent," or "parasitic" is a state-sanctioned act of abandonment. When the government enacts policies with foreseeable lethal consequences—such as the 10.9 million people projected to become uninsured—it is exercising its sovereign power to decide which lives are worth sustaining and which can be consigned to a state of precarity and managed decay.⁸ This framework allows for an understanding of these cuts not as a policy failure, but as a rational, albeit brutal, political project to manage populations into a state of "social death" where they are stripped of support and exposed to market forces with fatal consequences.⁴⁵

Part IV: Synthesizing the Agenda and Its Ramifications

Bringing together the policy details, human costs, and theoretical analysis reveals an agenda aimed at fundamentally restructuring the American state and its relationship to its citizens. The long-term consequences of this project extend beyond individual hardship to a state of broad societal decay.

Section 4.1: The Unspoken Agenda: From Social Contract to Social Abandonment

The ultimate goal of this political project is not merely to save money but to redefine the purpose of the American state. It represents a decisive break with the post-World War II consensus, in which the state, through its biopolitical functions, accepted a responsibility to ensure a minimum standard of living and social security for its citizens. The agenda seeks to replace this with a neoliberal, necropolitical state whose primary function is to enforce market discipline and protect the interests of capital.⁴⁴

In this new paradigm, citizens are valued primarily as "human capital".⁴⁵ Those who are unable to participate effectively in the labor market—due to age, illness, disability, caregiving responsibilities, or lack of marketable skills—are no longer viewed as citizens with rights to be upheld, but as economic liabilities to be managed and, ultimately, discarded. Their poverty is no longer constructed as a social problem requiring a collective solution, but as a personal failing deserving of punishment. The policies of retrenchment are the administrative mechanisms of this social abandonment.

Section 4.2: A Comparative Perspective: Domestic Austerity and Foreign Sanctions

While the political contexts are vastly different, a powerful analogy can be drawn between the mechanisms of severe domestic austerity and international economic sanctions. The core logic is identical: the deliberate denial of essential resources—food, medicine, fuel, capital—to a target population in order to compel a political outcome.⁵⁰ In both cases, the burden of this resource denial falls most heavily on the most vulnerable civilians: children, the elderly, and the sick, who are least responsible for the "problem" the policy purports to address. The use of starvation as a weapon of war, as seen in conflicts like the one in Gaza, operates on this same fundamental principle of leveraging deprivation against a helpless population.⁵¹ The coordinated cuts to SNAP and Medicaid within the OBBBA can thus be analyzed as a form of domestic, slow-moving "siege" waged against the nation's own poor.

Section 4.3: Long-Term Societal Decay: The True Cost of Abandonment

The ramifications of this agenda of abandonment will be profound and lasting, leading to a state of national decline.

• Erosion of Human Capital: By engineering widespread malnutrition and poor health, especially among children, the nation is actively sabotaging its future economic productivity, innovative capacity, and military readiness. A population that is sicker, less educated, and less nourished cannot compete effectively in a 21st-century global economy.³⁰

• Fractured Social Cohesion: The "makers vs. takers" rhetoric and the policies of upward redistribution are deeply corrosive to social solidarity. They foster resentment, destroy the sense of a shared national community with mutual obligations, and pit citizen against citizen in a zero-sum struggle for resources.³⁸

• The Precarity State: The end result is the creation of what the scholar Lauren Berlant terms an "Austerity State" that governs over "Precarious Peoples".⁴⁹ This institutionalizes a state of permanent instability, crisis, and anxiety for a growing segment of the population, which in turn leads to social unrest, higher crime rates, and a catastrophic loss of faith in democratic governance. This is not a path to national strength, but to long-term societal decay.

Conclusion: Answering the Unspoken Question

This report began by addressing the stark premise that the extreme cuts to social programs are tantamount to a policy of "slow mass extermination." While the research does not contain a "smoking gun" memo explicitly stating this as a goal, the weight of the evidence leads to a conclusion that is, in its material effects, functionally indistinguishable from such an agenda.

The convergence of four key factors supports this conclusion:

1. The systematic and comprehensive nature of the cuts, which simultaneously attack healthcare, nutrition, income support, and housing, leaving no recourse for those affected.

2. The demonstrable transfer of wealth, confirmed by the CBO, from the poorest households to the wealthiest, belying any claim of fiscal necessity.

3. The dehumanizing rhetoric of "dependency" and "takers," which frames the poor as a parasitic class deserving of their fate, thereby making punitive policies politically viable.

4. The foreseeable and quantifiable increases in death, disease, and malnutrition that are the direct and predictable result of these policies.

The ultimate agenda is one of necropolitical governance. It is the implementation of a political and economic system that designates a segment of the American population as disposable and then uses the administrative machinery of the state to withdraw the resources necessary for their survival. It is not the overt, spectacular violence of gas chambers, but the quiet, bureaucratic violence of a rescinded benefit, a denied claim, and a budget line that condemns millions to a shorter, sicker, and more brutal life. The unspoken truth is not a secret conspiracy, but a political logic operating in plain sight, whose devastating conclusions are deemed an acceptable price by its architects for the realization of their ideological vision.

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