Welfare has become one of the dirtiest words in America. In the dictionary, it means the “health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group.” In government, it refers to a range of programs designed to support people. But in common political parlance, it’s come to mean a transfer of taxpayer dollars from honest, hard-working Americans to lazy, undeserving moochers.

So it’s no surprise that when Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and puppetmaster of the Trump Administration, scours the government for waste with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), welfare programs will be scrutinized. Musk recently called Social Security a “ponzi scheme” and said on his social media platform, X, that Medicare “is where big money fraud is happening.” Despite President Trump’s campaign pledges to the contrary, Musk appears to be looking hard at deep cuts to Americans’ entitlements.

Defining waste

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are three of the biggest pillars of America’s welfare state. Wildly popular among both Democrats and Republicans, they provide healthcare coverage and steady incomes for the old, poor, or disabled. Musk and Trump claim they are rife with fraud, and that cutting them will save taxpayers money. 

They’ve even floated the idea of sending Americans $5,000 DOGE dividend checks from their budget cuts. That would buy them a lot of temporary grace, but these support programs are worth far more than any one-time payoff. Long after the money’s gone, when the retirement income stops coming and the medical debt piles up, Americans will regret trusting billionaires to decide what is and isn’t wasteful in their lives.

While they’ve highlighted some seemingly frivolous expenditures, neither Trump nor Musk have given any concrete definition for “waste.” In truth, some welfare programs operate with remarkable efficiency. 

As Matthew Desmond writes in Poverty, by America, “Roughly 85 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP] budget is dedicated to funding food stamps themselves, and almost 93 percent of Medicaid and even Supplemental Security Income dollars flow directly to beneficiaries.” These numbers are better than even high-performing charities, and their impacts are profound. But if you think feeding hungry people is a waste in the first place, it won’t matter how efficiently the program accomplishes its goal.

A different kind of security

Conspicuously missing from DOGE’s radar are the enormous corporate subsidies to military contractors like Musk himself. According to The Washington Post, Musk’s companies have received a staggering $38 billion in government contracts, loans, and tax rebates. After Trump’s inauguration it was reported that Tesla, a $1 trillion company that paid $0 in taxes in 2024, was set to receive another $400 million contract for armored vehicles. Taxes allow Musk to put nearly 7,000 satellites into low-earth orbit, giving him tremendous powers of surveillance, yet he wants to slash environmental protections and entitlements for ordinary people.

Perhaps surprisingly, Musk has proposed cuts to the Pentagon, citing its repeated audit failures and $800 billion budget. So far, though, it’s unclear how much will be cut. Trump increased the military’s budget every year of his first term. Whether DOGE compels the Pentagon to tighten its belt or not, it’s worth asking why there is often so much less scrutiny of military and police budgets than of entitlement programs like Medicaid. 

The answer may seem obvious: Police and the military defend our lives and our freedom. But this spending also primarily benefits the nation’s wealthy. Police are there to prevent riff-raff from disrupting commerce. The military theoretically defends the homeland, but in practice they spend a lot more time securing global markets. 

Assuming, though, that Americans accept the premise – that large military and police budgets are necessary for our protection – why wouldn’t we invest in healthcare and Social Security? The threats from cancer and poverty are far more widespread than those from terrorism or gang violence. 

Again, the answer is that the rich need not fear costly healthcare or destitution, and they have no interest in sacrificing a portion of their largesse to defend you from them. Quite the opposite; these perils ensure them a steadily exploitable workforce. Republicans openly and proudly acknowledge this. As the right-wing Heritage Foundation put it, for workers, “The threat of an empty stomach is a great motivator.”

The campaign against welfare

The contempt for basic welfare many Americans hold can be chilling. Not only do we have no pride in taking care of one another, we think it’s the wrong thing to do. In any healthy society, programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and housing assistance would be supported even by those who don’t need them: on basic moral grounds, to maintain the health of society, and because there but for the grace of God go any of us. 

Instead, Republicans rail against things like free lunches for schoolchildren. That psychopathy is now normalized, and it’s toxified huge swaths of the country. Elected Republicans are practically lustful in their desire to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, placing basically everyone who’s not a millionaire in jeopardy of abject ruin. Just last week the House GOP passed a budget that orders $880 billion in spending cuts, jeopardizing millions of poor and disabled Medicaid recipients, including children.

Yet many Americans celebrate this destruction of our public goods. Right-wing propaganda plays a huge role in this. It has convinced people that their neighbors are better off without the assistance, that overcoming suffering on their own builds character. At the extreme end, some believe their countrymen deserve poverty. Others are laser-focused on minimizing taxes, regardless of the social consequences. Many become jaded by stories of Americans who game the system.

Is there waste, fraud, and abuse of these systems? Absolutely, and some of the worst offenders are the already-very-rich. Corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s rely on government programs to subsidize their poverty wages while raking in billions in profit. Mobsters, crooked doctors, and others bilk Americans out of billions of dollars through Medicare, HUD, and other kinds of fraud. Shortly after the pandemic, the government forgave $755 billion in Paycheck Protection Program loans issued to business owners.

But instead of focusing on how the system further enriches the already-well-off, politicians worry about an occasional poor person who fakes a disability, then use them as justification to shred the safety net. This is because their donors, who fly in private jets, own vast swaths of land, and can afford premium medical care, have no need for public transportation, affordable housing, or subsidized healthcare. Many of the rich yearn to extricate themselves from organized society entirely, with private armies, private property, indentured servitude, and no tax burden.

For example, Trump has affectionately referred to the Gilded Age as our “richest” period. This was a time of child labor, no worker protections, rampant corruption, and severe inequality. It led to socialist and union movements and, eventually, the New Deal. Now, the central mission of the Republican Party is to annihilate any traces left of New Deal thinking. The end result will be more yachts for Jeff Bezos and millions more malnourished, under-educated Americans. It’s tough to find words for a party so pathologically committed to destroying, essentially, the fabric of society. 

The fight to put people over profit

It’s important to understand this wider context to place the chaos of Trump, Musk, and DOGE in perspective. The Reagan Revolution, the Contract with America, FOX News, and MAGA are all descendants in the same lineage, and they share a common goal: Obliterate the government’s ability to more equitably spread the nation’s bounty of material comforts from those who have a mountain of them to those who have few or none. Trump and Musk, with their flamboyant personalities, have cultivated a base that cheers the acceleration of that process.

The peril extends beyond welfare programs and into our public health infrastructure, parks and wildlife, education system, and basically everything that makes America a country instead of a patchwork of corporate fiefdoms. If Trump and Musk have their way, it will all be up for grabs, leaving nothing but a hollowed-out husk of a nation with a price tag on every square inch.

Finding our way out of this far-right fever dream and building a cooperative society will take considerable effort. But the robber barons of the Gilded Age didn’t want to invest in the health of the nation, either. People will have to fight for it today just as they did then, and we can start by affirming that it is not wasteful to invest in our health, education, and happiness. 

From there, the approach is multifaceted and will evolve over time. Where possible, the fight can include legislative demands like tax hikes on the wealthy, closing loopholes to their tax obligations, or reducing the burdens of poverty through things like rent caps and tax credits for the poor. Communities must organize around their common economic interests, strike, protest, and collectively bargain with politicians, landlords, employers and other controlling segments of society. Authoritarian Republicans will deploy all the propaganda and state violence at their disposal against anyone involved in these activities, but the fight has to happen.

There are a lot of good reasons to hate the government. Its capacity to pool our resources and administrate a cooperative society with safety nets isn’t a good one. There are few greater risks to the American people than the dissolution of their healthcare, retirement, environment, and national trust.
We should invest in public housing because people who are better taken care of are less likely to resort to crime. We should invest in public health because diseases spread, and sickness and suffering can afflict us all. We should invest in education so our children grow up to contribute to our nation’s shared knowledge and advancement. Without these investments, we place our futures at the mercy of oligarchs like Elon Musk and Donald Trump who are solely interested in profit. If national security means holding the country together, then welfare for the people, in whatever form it takes, is essential to our national interest.