House Speaker Mike Johnson at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 20, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
With President Donald Trump's tariff proposals causing considerable anxiety in the stock market, a combination of business leaders — including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon — and economists (including Paul Krugman and Robert Reich) fear the possibility of a recession.
If a recession occurs, many Americans will need help from the federal government — be it food assistance via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or health insurance through Obamacare.
But according to Brendan Duke (senior director for federal budget policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities), the 2025 federal budget being proposed by Republicans in Congress is designed to erode and undermine — not fund — the United States' social safety net.
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In a Q&A interview with Salon's Chauncey DeVega published on April 10, Duke warned, "Everywhere you look, you see an attack on core government functions. The Trump Administration is trying to degrade the Social Security Administration's ability to provide elderly and disabled Americans the benefits they're entitled to. They are firing people working at the National Weather Service who provide the data for the weather report you see on your phone. They're hamstringing billions of dollars of cancer research by putting on leave the people who make sure that the research dollars go to cancer researchers."
Duke added, "The goal is not to let all of the horrible things distract you from doing your job, though. It's critical that people whose job it is to protect the programs that low- and moderate-income people rely on focus on the threats and opportunities that are appearing."
Duke cited specific safety-net programs that GOP lawmakers are targeting for major cuts.
"The plans being talked about right now, such as cutting Medicaid and SNAP to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, are part of the standard conservative playbook," Duke told DeVega. "The difference is that our fiscal situation has gotten worse over the last 25 years — we're a long way off from the Clinton budget surpluses — so they feel pressure to cut programs instead of putting tax cuts for rich people on the credit card."
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Duke continued, "We're still at the stage where they aren't providing specifics of how they're going to cut these programs, but the House Republican budget sets them on a course to cut Medicaid by 10 percent and SNAP by 20 percent. Those are enormous cuts. Some of the goodies they are planning to give to rich people include allowing high-income business owners to write off 20 percent of their profits, doubling the amounts the heirs of the largest estates can inherit tax-free from $14 million to $28 million per couple, and enacting hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks for businesses that don't need a tax break."
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Chauncey DeVega's full Salon interview with Brendan Duke is available at this link.