Trump’s Attacks On Healthcare Hit the Poorest the Hardest

The Trump administration has pursued broad program cuts that remove billions in previously appropriated foreign and domestic health funds, while simultaneously curtailing core capacities at institutions such as the CDC. The White House’s demand to cut back billions in foreign-assisted funding—which supported vital global health programs—and the dismantling of foreign assistance programs like USAID, is a cruel operation being carried out under the guise of ‘putting America first,’ which is far from reality. Domestically, reporting has documented attempts to block and even withhold funding for a range of programs including violence protection to chronic disease prevention. This goes well beyond budget restructuring, signaling a clear attempt to reorient state policy away from supporting preventative public health services and towards short-term political maneuvering that will almost always hit the poorest the hardest. 

At the core of this assault is a deeper ideological project that is entirely subordinated to capital. What we are witnessing is not merely bureaucratic incompetence or partisan hostility toward science, but a deliberate redrawing of the boundaries between public knowledge and corporate power. The hollowing out of federal health infrastructure creates a vacuum easily filled by private actors that range from pharmaceutical conglomerates to consulting firms to right-wing think tanks, all of whom now dictate what counts as “credible evidence.” The CDC’s sidelining, for instance, didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It follows a decades-long pattern of neoliberal governance that treats state institutions as inefficient relics to be either defunded or outsourced. The pandemic revealed the human cost of this logic: millions were left without coherent guidance, while disinformation—sometimes seeded by officials themselves—became the governing principle of public life. Yet the Trump administration’s open contempt for expertise has turned that crisis into a governing style. The line between policy and propaganda has blurred so thoroughly that the nation’s health priorities are now set not in labs or community clinics, but on cable news panels and in corporate boardrooms.

The cruelty we are witnessing on an almost daily basis is a structural condition that aims to put profit over solidarity and the material welfare for the most underprivileged. The working poor, Black and brown communities, and those living in rural health deserts, many of whom are already burdened by systemic neglect, are being forced to navigate a public health landscape where science is treated as optional, and accountability nonexistent. If this trend continues, the consequences will extend far beyond any one administration. The corrosion of public health is, fundamentally, the degradation of the social body itself, revealing the slow decay of a system that has traded in collective care for the accumulation of capital, no matter how it impacts the working class. With this in mind, when the state abandons its duty to safeguard collective well-being, it invites private authority to fill the void, namely with lobbyists and disinformation networks that masquerade as experts. What we all have at stake here isn’t just funding for research or access to care but the very idea that truth should serve the public good rather than private interest.

The deliberate dismantling of scientific infrastructure is a growing crisis that reflects a state which no longer conceives of itself as accountable to the collective, but to the powerful few who benefit from confusion and decay. No one can deny that the public’s trust in scientific evidence is being systematically eroded, and that institutions are now subordinating even the smallest amount of integrity for the sake of political obedience, which leads us to a position where governance ceases to be a vehicle of collective welfare and instead becomes an instrument of domination. What replaces it is not just the kind of dysfunction we all may begrudgingly get accustomed to, but a managed collapse in which power deliberately manufactures our day-to-day realities while we watch each other’s suffering be redistributed along lines of class and race. The assault on science is, in this sense, evidence of the dismantling of the material conditions that make collective reasoning and public accountability possible. To reclaim public health, then, is not simply to restore funding or safeguard research; it is to confront the political economy that profits from ignorance and disposability, and to insist that truth and survival remain public, not privatized, goods.