Too Cruel Too Soon

How Republicans messed up on Project 2025

Federal funding for SNAP, the nutritional aid program still often referred to as food stamps, ends tonight. This will have catastrophic impacts on 42 million Americans, the great majority of them children, elderly or disabled.

Millions more Americans are about to discover that health insurance has become vastly more expensive, in many cases unaffordable.

Why are these terrible things happening? At a basic level they’re happening because Republicans want them to happen. Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer.

But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections. For example, draconian work requirements for Medicaid — which would effectively throw millions off the program, largely by imposing paperwork burdens low-wage workers can’t overcome — weren’t scheduled to take effect until the end of 2026.

Why the backloading? Presumably Republicans believed that by the time Americans woke up to what was happening, the G.O.P. would have effectively consolidated one-party rule, making future elections irrelevant.

Instead, however, the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule.

I guess it’s possible that Republicans will manage to limit the political damage by claiming — completely falsely — that the suffering about to hit millions is being caused by Democrats who want to lavish benefits on illegal immigrants and pay for sex change operations. That’s not hyperbole. Here’s the banner currently at the top of the Agriculture Department’s SNAP data page — its data page!

In the past it would have been unthinkable to display political propaganda, let alone grotesquely dishonest propaganda, on government data sites. But we’re in a new world.

We’ll just have to see how all this plays politically. But it’s clear that Republicans messed up badly on the implementation of Project 2025. Immense cruelty was always part of the plan, but policy wasn’t supposed to get this cruel, this soon.

So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.)

Start with health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, enacted under Barack Obama, allows Americans to buy insurance plans through a regulated Marketplace in which insurers cannot discriminate based on medical history — that is, you can still get coverage if you have a preexisting condition. To make the Marketplace work, the ACA subsidizes premiums, on a sliding scale that depends on your income.

As originally created, however, the ACA was underpowered: The subsidies were too small. The Biden administration helped fix that, making the subsidies bigger and also eliminating a sudden cutoff of subsidies for families above a relatively modest income. Right now 24 million Americans get their health coverage through the Marketplace, the vast majority of them subsidized.

But the enhanced subsidies only extended through 2025, so the system faces an imminent cliff. The out of pocket cost of health insurance for 2026 is soaring — 114 percent on average, according to KFF, and much more for some families. This cost surge reflects both the loss of subsidies and a selection effect: Relatively healthy people, facing sharply higher premiums, will decide to go without coverage. This will worsen the risk pool, and the expectation that this will happen is leading insurers to increase their pre-subsidy premiums.

So millions of Americans are about to feel both desperate and angry over their loss of affordable health insurance coverage. Which raises an obvious political question: Why didn’t Republicans try to do what they’re doing on Medicaid and backload this pain until after the midterm elections, extending enhanced subsidies for another year?

I very much doubt that this was a strategic decision on their part. My guess is that they simply stumbled into this crisis, because senior Republicans in Congress and their advisors just don’t understand how the Affordable Care Act works, and never have. After all, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his membership in a political cult depends on his not understanding it.

I mean, Republicans are currently promising to offer a superior alternative to Obamacare, any day now, which is actually kind of funny in a gallows-humor way. After all, they’ve been making the same promise, year after year, ever since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, and have consistently come up empty, because they’ve never understood why the ACA works the way it does. And all indications are that they were blindsided by the current catastrophe. Everyone who knows anything about health policy saw this coming — but none of those people work for the G.O.P.

In fact, administration officials still seem to be in denial about what’s happening (no, KFF hasn’t retracted its estimate):

The health care disaster has, in turn, played a crucial role in the government shutdown.

There are actually many Trump administration actions that Democrats could, with justification, have cited as reasons not to support continued funding for the federal government unless Republicans make some concessions. But the Democrats have chosen to make their stand over health care, and polling suggests that they have chosen very good ground. Here’s YouGov:

The government shutdown, in turn, has led to a cutoff of funds for SNAP. So the premature outbreaks of cruelty are all connected.

But why don’t Republicans cut their losses by postponing the food stamp and health care crises? The Trump administration could provide immediate relief on SNAP by releasing the program’s $5 billion contingency fund — in fact, withholding that money is almost certainly illegal. Beyond that, Congress could restore SNAP funding with a standalone bill, which would have bipartisan support. And the whole shutdown could be ended if Republicans would just temporarily extend enhanced ACA subsidies, pushing the pain past the midterms.

So why isn’t any of this happening?

The refusal to release SNAP contingency funds could reflect a deeply cynical political calculation — Democrats care when people go hungry, we don’t, so let’s use SNAP recipients as hostages. But I doubt that it’s that calculated. Instead, it reflects a visceral dislike for doing anything that helps people in need.

This visceral dislike is also a large part of the reason Republicans won’t agree to a standalone bill that maintains SNAP funding, a bill that would easily pass. The same goes for modifying the budget to temporarily maintain health insurance subsidies. Democrats would have a hard time rejecting such a deal, even though it might help Republicans politically. But again, it would help Americans in need, and the G.O.P. just hates doing that.

But there’s a further problem. Passing either a SNAP bill or a revised budget would require calling the House of Representatives back into session, which would in turn make it impossible for Mike Johnson, the speaker, to keep stalling the swearing-in of Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election more than 5 weeks ago. And here’s the thing: Once sworn in, Grijalva would provide the decisive signature to trigger a vote in the House to release the Epstein files.

The idea that Johnson’s unprecedented refusal to swear in a duly elected member of Congress reflects his determination to protect pedophiles sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s looking more and more like the only coherent explanation of his actions. And if he believes that the House must be kept closed to maintain his stonewalling, that prevents any resolution of the nutrition and health care crises.

In any case, the political strategy behind Republicans’ policy agenda appears to have gone completely off the rails. The plan was to mask the true harshness of this agenda by delaying much of its cruelty, with the worst effects not hitting until after the midterms. Instead, severe nutrition and health care crises are happening right now. And I have no idea how they’ll be resolved.

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