Trump Drive to Cut Safety Net Could Hit His Voters

In his first term as president, Donald J. Trump targeted what many Republicans consider blatant welfare waste — a rule that gives food stamps to millions of people with incomes above the usual limit on eligibility.

His proposed change would have saved billions but hurt low-income workers making the bootstraps efforts that conservatives say they want to encourage. Advocates for the needy resisted and the effort to shrink the program died during the pandemic, but it illustrates a challenge Mr. Trump may face as he pledges to cut spending in his second term while courting the working class.

Republicans are mulling deep cuts in safety net spending, partly to offset big tax cuts aimed mostly at the wealthy. But some programs they propose to cut reach not just the poorest Americans but also struggling working class voters, many of whom helped elect Mr. Trump in November.

“There is absolutely a tension,” said Douglas Elmendorf, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who teaches at Harvard. “The Republican Party’s support is increasingly coming from people who would be hurt by standard conservative policy.”

How much the Republicans will cut is unclear, with many forces in play. Reasons to expect deep reductions start with Mr. Trump’s first term, when he sought wholesale cuts in food stamps, Medicaid and housing aid, and nearly repealed the Affordable Care Act, which provides health insurance to 44 million Americans.

Though most of his efforts stalled in Congress or in court, he returns atop a movement with more policy expertise, while pushing tax cuts amid huge deficits, which increases the political pressure on safety net spending.

Days after the election, Mr. Trump created an advisory group known as “the Department of Government Efficiency,” whose leader, Elon Musk, has called for as much as $2 trillion of cuts in a $6.75 trillion federal budget. Mr. Musk referred to such cuts as budgetary “shock waves,” though he has since acknowledged that he expects to fall short. With more than half of the budget likely off-limits (Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest on the national debt), programs for the needy are especially vulnerable.

“This is probably the deepest peril the safety net has been in for at least three decades,” said Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution, a longtime advocate for programs to reduce poverty.

Impediments to major reductions of government aid include the Republicans’ narrow House majority, which could give moderates from swing districts veto power. Business lobbies, like hospitals and insurance companies, have stakes in safety net spending, and governors may resist changes that shift costs to states.

Mr. Trump did not campaign against safety net spending and has been more willing than many Republicans to run deficits and accept the rapidly growing national debt. “I don’t see a wholesale revamping of safety net programs,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who runs the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.

Among the uncertain forces are the views of the working-class voters Mr. Trump wants to maintain. Programs like Medicaid reach higher up the income scale than in previous eras, but whether voters of modest means would punish Republicans for cuts is unclear. The policy details can be hard for ordinary voters to follow, and some working-class voters share critics’ views that the needy abuse aid. Democrats greatly expanded the safety net during the pandemic, only to lose ground with low-income voters.

Here is a guide to some of the programs Republicans may seek to cut:

Health Care

The most significant battles may involve health care, given the cost. Federal spending on Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the needy, tops $600 billion a year, nearly 10 percent of the budget. Subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans have exceeded $125 billion.

The aid has reduced the share of Americans without health insurance to a record low, but critics call the cost unsustainable and say that government control stifles innovation.

Republicans are likely to renew their push for Medicaid work requirements, arguing that the mandates help the needy find jobs. The first Trump administration approved 13 state plans, but they were stopped in court, suspended during the pandemic or blocked by the Biden administration.

Critics say the rules deny people care. They point to Arkansas, which dropped about 18,000 people from the rolls, many with jobs. After the House passed a national work requirement in 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimated 1.5 million people would lose federal aid (though it predicted states would cover many with their own funds).

Some Republicans would go much further by capping federal funds, which grow automatically as people qualify. That would save large sums, but fundamentally alter the program by giving states an incentive to reduce enrollment or care. The caps proposed by the Republican Study Committee, which includes most House Republicans, would cut spending by more than half.

Politically, one advantage to spending caps is that they let Congress save money while leaving states to specify who loses aid. “They don’t leave any identifiable person worse off,” said Matthew Fiedler, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

The Affordable Care Act, or A.C.A., faces pressure, too. Enrollment in private A.C.A. plans soared after Congress increased the subsidies during the pandemic. But that expanded funding expires this year, and Republicans are unlikely to renew it.

The A.C.A. has also brought Medicaid to the working poor. With federal funds covering most of the cost, 40 states and the District of Columbia cover adults up to 138 percent of the poverty line — about $43,000 for a family of four. Republicans fought the expansion, and some would reverse it by cutting the subsidies.

Although Mr. Trump has said he is no longer determined to abolish the Affordable Care Act, which he continues to criticize, he has offered no specifics.

Nutrition

Mr. Trump has long called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps — a source of dependency and fraud. As president, he sought to reduce eligibility, expand work rules and partly replace benefits with food boxes.

Republicans may be especially eager for cuts after the Biden administration raised benefits by more than 25 percent, in what critics called an end-run past Congress. Benefits reach about one in eight Americans and cost about $100 billion a year.

Many conservatives argue there is room to cut without imposing hardship or losing political support. “People want to work and provide for their families, not receive government benefits,” said Angela Rachidi of the American Enterprise Institute, who co-authored a recent plan to reduce the SNAP program.

Mr. Trump may renew his first-term effort to deny aid to households above the normal eligibility line. Critics call the rule he tried to change (“broad-based categorical eligibility”) a loophole for people who do not need help. But more than three million people could lose benefits, many of them workers with high rent or child care costs.

He has also supported firmer SNAP work requirements. They apply to less than 10 percent of the caseload — able-bodied adults without dependent children — but those affected are poorer and more vulnerable than others on food stamps. Conservatives say exemptions are too permissive and work rules help the needy. But the Congressional Budget Office found that work programs lowered participants’ income because “far more adults stopped receiving SNAP benefits” than found jobs.

Some Republicans, including the Make America Healthy Again wing of Mr. Trump’s movement, would also ban food stamps from being used to buy what they call junk food.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, is a critic of processed food, and Jay Bhattacharya, who is slated to run the National Institutes of Health, coauthored a paper that found banning SNAP purchases of sugary drinks would lower obesity and diabetes.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas cited his research in saying she would seek federal permission to “prohibit using SNAP for junk food.” Critics say the needy deserve the same choices as others, and lobbyists for the beverage industry are fighting back.

Housing and Homelessness

Each of Mr. Trump’s White House budgets sought cuts in housing aid, which is already limited. Only one in four eligible households receives help, and waits last years. Mr. Trump proposed to reduce the number of Housing Choice Vouchers, the main assistance program, by more than 10 percent. The House Appropriations Committee last year voted to do the same.

Soaring private rents, which the vouchers subsidize, make the program increasingly expensive, and some conservatives say the aid saps recipients’ initiative to work and advance. Project 2025, a policy blueprint by Trump allies, called housing programs “poverty traps” that should carry time limits. Scott Turner, Mr. Trump’s choice as housing secretary, has warned of “the perverse incentives created by government and the welfare system.”

While seeking cuts in housing aid, Mr. Trump has promised a tougher approach to homelessness. In a campaign video, he called the homeless “violent and dangerously deranged,” urged cities to ban sleeping in public, and pledged to place unhoused people in camps with services.

He did not mention housing costs, which many scholars blame for record-level homelessness.

Republicans would also end “Housing First,” the doctrine that guides about $3 billion a year in federal grants to homelessness programs. Housing First programs provide the chronically homeless with subsidized housing and offer — but do not require — treatment for addiction or mental illness. The housing saves lives, they say, while treatment mandates drive people away.

Critics, including many rescue missions, say the approach fails to address underlying issues and results in people returning to the street. Robert Marbut, Mr. Trump’s last homelessness coordinator, said he favored “Housing Fourth.”

Other

Amid the promise of budgetary “shock waves,” other cuts could be coming. Project 2025 called for eliminating Head Start, the 60-year-old preschool program, and labeled a summer meals initiative for children a “federal catering service.”

Though Mr. Trump said he had no ties to Project 2025, he chose one of its authors, Russell T. Vought, as White House budget director, a job he held in the first Trump term.

The administration is likely to renew efforts to discourage legal immigrants from receiving aid. The “public charge” rule issued in Mr. Trump’s first term, but blocked in the courts, would have penalized immigrants who get benefits like Medicaid or food stamps by making it harder for them to become permanent residents.

There is one benefit Mr. Trump may be open to expanding. His 2017 tax bill doubled the child tax credit to $2,000 a year, an achievement he highlighted in his campaign. But about a quarter of children do not receive the full sum because their parents earn too little.

Under President Biden, Democrats temporarily raised the credit and gave it to all low-income children, regardless of parental earnings — a policy that sharply reduced child poverty, but that critics called welfare.

The Trump credit remains, but expires this year. Its fate will be part of the looming tax debate, and some Republicans appear willing to make it more generous to low-income households.

Doing so might answer critics who call Republican tax cuts a sop to the rich and strengthen Mr. Trump’s working-class appeal. But Republican support for a credit expansion for the needy is uncertain, and the politics are hard to predict: Democrats wonder why their expansion produced few political dividends.