As you’ve probably heard by now, the federal government is in a shutdown because the Republicans who currently control all branches of government have refused to negotiate with Democrats over their demand to keep in place the subsidies for health insurance premiums that keep their costs manageable.
All shutdowns affect government services, but the Trump administration seems eager to use this one to permanently cut down on federal staff, shutter programs it doesn’t like and put some services on hold even if they don’t need to be during a shutdown. Most ominously, the administration has said it will suspend SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps, choosing not to tap into an emergency fund that could keep the program running for some 42 million lower-income people around the country. This will, needless to say, cause an immense amount of suffering for a whole lot of people, in a way that I think is politically idiotic for an administration already bleeding public support. And even beyond those major harms, it is, I think, a perfect example of the ways in which Trump and his henchmen are seeking to torpedo state capacity not only for the federal government but every level of government across the U.S.
I think that people in general, even those who are appreciative of the work of the government, tend to underestimate the sheer scale and complexity of the contemporary U.S. federal government. Single programs that many people have never heard of routinely surpass entire municipal budgets and staff. The standard criticism is that a lot of this is frittered away on waste and fraud. But while there are undoubtedly inefficiencies, everything I’ve seen from my years of reporting indicates that much of the government is actually quite nimble and pragmatic with resources, setting aside boondoggles like some of the more extravagant Department of Defense weapons development projects and such.
Everyone takes for granted the things the government churns away at in the background – tasks that people count on even if they hardly ever think about them. Take, for example, the weather. You might think that your weather forecast comes from Apple or the Weather Channel or some other app, but in a more fundamental way, it’s coming from the government. These private services certainly have their own technologies and staffs to ingest a lot of the data, add to it and present it in ways that are useful to their customers. But a huge chunk of that underlying data has been collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other federal entities.
Repeat this throughout the whole of government; every day, food inspections, dam monitoring, cybersecurity countermeasures, scientific research and much more happens under the auspices of a robust federal administration in ways that the majority of people don’t often pause to consider. They will, however, notice it when these services are gone, and that rings especially true for state and local governments that are still trying to provide security and services for their own constituents, whether the federal workforce is on the job or not.
One of the acute but under-discussed consequences of Trump’s destruction of federal administrative capacity is a concurrent loss of state and local capacity, as these governments are forced to step up as best they can where the federal government has stepped back. As the sudden disappearance of SNAP benefits looms, for example, Gov. Kathy Hochul has designated $30 million in emergency food aid for the state. That sounds like a lot to suddenly rustle up, and it’s certainly a commendable response – but it’s also a pittance in comparison to the federal funding that’s disappearing: New Yorkers used some $7.35 billion in SNAP benefits just last fiscal year. That means that the $30 million infusion represents just about 0.4% of that expenditure. Put another way, replacing total SNAP spending for the state would be equal to almost 3% of its entire annual budget. Attempting to replace the spending here would require cuts elsewhere.
This all has higher-order effects as well. Families who can hardly afford food even with SNAP payments are almost certainly going to dramatically cut back on other spending if SNAP disappears, which will hurt the economy as a whole. People who are tight financially are going to avoid preventive medical care, and some might eventually end up in the emergency room, which costs us all more in addition to having worse health outcomes for everyone. One often unexpected impact of food insecurity is that people having trouble feeding themselves can’t afford to feed their pets, which means that more pets will end up abandoned or turned over to already overloaded shelters. And this is all only resulting from the SNAP crash, which is coming in tandem with many other Trump attempts to undermine governmental capacity.
There’s already some talk about risks to the state’s next budget as a result of the rollback of both federal funding and federal functions. Just keeping things running is going to cost a hell of a lot more. If the feds just stop, for example, engaging in vaccine research or pharmaceutical testing, what then? Can we do that ourselves? Probably not. Is there a world where states and localities can effectively replicate what the federal government is able to do on their own? Or even where a global metropolis like New York City could establish itself as a semi self-sufficient municipality à la Singapore? Maybe, in theory, but that world isn’t this one. In this one, we are all pretty highly dependent on the functions of a federal government that is being pushed into the shredder.
This is also all designed to be difficult to reverse. The administrative state opponents to whom our administrative state has been turned over are not interested in reshaping it or turning it into their own ends (with some exceptions, like the federal agencies that can be utilized to conduct immigration enforcement). They want to burn it all down. They’re arsonists, who hate that we built this kind of society and pine for one where those who have the resources to survive do and those who lack them perhaps do not.
Of course, even on its own terms, this doesn’t make sense, as all these people have benefited pretty enormously from the government, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that while we can think of ourselves as much better insulated here in a state and city that seems far more geared toward active intervention to help their residents, the destruction of a functioning government is not something we can keep at bay on our own.
