IS CONGRESS LISTENING?

Members are Meeting with Constituents

All this week senators and representatives have been back in their home districts meeting with their constituents. I have to wonder what they are saying and what they are hearing. I suppose the Democrats are hugging each other, wailing about the loss of our democracy, and lamenting their inability to do anything about it. Republican senators and representatives are surely bragging to pumped up crowds in MAGA hats about how they are dismantling the “Deep State” and making government more efficient. The big unanswered question, though, is whether the Republicans are listening to the Democrats and knowledgeable Republicans in their districts or hearing concerns about the potential loss of government benefits that their constituents rely on for survival.

So far, the only complaints reported by the legacy media have come from farmers who have lost government contracts to export grain and other products, or who have invested in energy-saving infrastructure that the Biden administration promised to reimburse but the Trump administration has cancelled. The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal continues to gently suggest that the Trump team may be heading in the wrong direction on certain issues they consider important but have not sounded any alarms of a pending economic collapse. And the cancelling of fundamental government services has not yet come home to roost with the largely Republican voters who will be most affected by their loss.

It won’t be long before the people who voted for Trump begin to lose federal benefits that they take for granted, including low-cost health care, food assistance, and disaster relief. Once those benefits disappear, voters who don’t pay attention to politics or whose access to reliable news is limited may begin to realize the personal value of those benefits to themselves and complain to their elected representatives. Veterans, who tend to lean Republican, are about to experience cuts to VA health services. Massive cuts to the federal workforce are bound to raise unemployment rates across the country. The loss of food benefits and other family assistance programs will dramatically increase the poverty rate, especially in majority Republican rural areas.

While Elon Musk rushes to download massive amounts of personal information from closely guarded government databases to advance his personal goals, his teams of teenage ninja techies are not finding any significant fraud, waste or incompetence in government programs. Their hasty pronouncement that more people are collecting Social Security payments than the total population of the country clearly exposes their naivete and ignorance. They have yet to document a single case of actual fraud or waste in the departments they have invaded so far. Instead, they have unwittingly exposed the many positive aspects and values of the programs administered by those agencies, many of which even well-informed people did not know about.

And therein lies the rub. While the Biden administration quietly expanded federal assistance to those who needed it most, resulting in dramatic reductions in unemployment and childhood poverty, their work largely went unreported and unrecognized. Only by the Trump administration taking a sledgehammer to those programs will their value be widely recognized. It will take more time for the effects of the Trump cuts to hit home with a majority of voters, but I expect their senators and representatives will be hearing from them by mid-summer. By then, national parks will be closed because of the shortage of personnel, inflation will be soaring because of ill-considered tariffs, fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as processed meats and poultry, will be hard to find at any price because the workers who harvest the crops and labor in the processing plants have been deported.

Multiple surveys have shown that 80 to 90 percent of the population supports the government programs that Musk’s team are trying to dismantle. And the incompetence, bloating, and waste in the federal bureaucracy that the Republicans have been attacking since the 1960s has largely been eliminated outside of the defense department. The total number of federal government employees has remained level over the past four decades, while the country’s population has grown 50 percent*. This whole exercise in downsizing the government is nothing more than a quixotic attack on an imaginary enemy that will create enormous hardship for many Americans.

The important question to ask now is at what point, if at all, will the Republicans in congress stand up and claw back the authority that they have ceded to the president? I always reserve the right to be wrong but suspect they might reach that tipping point within a few months.

*Political historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote last night that the number of federal employees was actually higher 50 years ago, and that the country’s population has increased 68% since that time.

Thanks to Micke Luckovich for today’s cartoon.