Everything Is Bad On Purpose

When you set out to break the government, you wind up with a broken country.

A few numbers:

• 104: The number of people who have been confirmed dead so far in Texas floods, including 28 children.

• 20%: How much of the staffs of both the National Weather Service and FEMA have decreased under Trump’s presidency.

• .08%: The percentage of the federal budget that went to PEPFAR, the US’s HIV/AIDS relief program that provided HIV prevention, treatment, and care to millions of people in 50 countries.

• 75,000: The number of people, including children, who have died since PEPFAR was cut by Elon Musk and Donald Trump less than six months ago.

• Four: The number of years that have passed since Texas passed its abortion ban, which was upheld by the Supreme Court; that same court quickly went on to allow for abortion to be banned nationwide.

• 33%: How much rates of sepsis increased among pregnant women in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021.

• 2000: The year measles was declared eliminated in the United States.

• 1,277: The number of measles cases reported in the US this year.

• $9.4 billion: The amount of funding already approved for NPR, PBS, and foreign aid, that Trump is now asking Congress to cut.

• $170 billion: How much ICE and other border enforcement is set to receive thanks to the One Big, Beautiful Bill.

• 12 million: The number of Americans projected to lose their healthcare thanks to the Medicaid cuts in the One Big, Beautiful Bill.

• 40%: The proportion of US births covered by Medicaid (and it’s 50% in rural areas).

• Three: The number of Republican senators who voted against the One Big, Beautiful Bill.

Things are very bad right now. The GOP just passed Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill (OBBB), which is both a massive cash transfer from the poor to the rich and a tectonic change to America’s already-fragile healthcare system. It’s frankly hard to wrap my mind around how any sane person believes this bill is a good idea. Sure, it’s a big cash grab for the rich — but the rich are gonna get less rich if the dollar continues to fall, America can no longer manage our debt, and the US economy crashes. Millions kicked off of Medicaid also means a sicker population, and even if you don’t really care about the wellbeing of your fellow citizens, a sicker population means fewer workers (healthy people are more likely to be and stay employed than sick ones) and higher costs (people who don’t get healthcare and then show up in ERs in times of medical crisis cost a lot of money).

And it’s a terrifying cash-grab for ICE, which is increasingly turning into Trump’s secret police. There is no reason why domestic immigration enforcement needs more federal funding than is directed to the FBI, the DEA, the the ATF, the U.S. Marshals, and the Bureau of Prisons combined. ICE is now the most generously-funded law enforcement agency in American history. ICE agents are rampaging through American cities, faces covered — ICE agents are the only people conservatives like seeing masked in public — grabbing people up and stuffing them into vans to be housed god knows where or shipped off to god knows where (Salvadoran prison for terrorists? War-torn South Sudan?) with no due process. Some of them are US citizens; others had the legal right to be in the US; and Trump has flat-out said that he plans to target US citizens next.