Yves here. We’re again and again seeing the Trump Administration use the same radical yet so far effective playbook: deny Congressionally mandated payments under all sorts of programs by smashing the bureaucratic machinery necessary to execute. Poor people are a top target. Here, Trump has eliminated the team expert in the highly technical matter of determining what poverty thresholds are. No reference point, no action.
I don’t mean to sound like I am channeling Thomas Friedman, but a taxi driver practicing his English managed to extract from me that I was American. He immediately said, “Trump America first” and gave a mini-litany on who wuffering, such as “LGTBQs”. He then explained why everyone but Trump and Elon Musk was being hurt. I gave him the update on Musk falling out with Trump.
By Arthur Allen. Originally published at KFF Health News
President Donald Trump’s firings at the Department of Health and Human Services included the entire office that sets federal poverty guidelines, which determine whether tens of millions of Americans are eligible for health programs such as Medicaid, food assistance, child care, and other services, former staff said.
The small team, with technical data expertise, worked out of HHS’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, or ASPE. Their dismissal mirrored others across HHS, which came without warning and left officials puzzled as to why they were “RIF’ed” — as in “reduction in force,” the bureaucratic language used to describe the firings.
“I suspect they RIF’ed offices that had the word ‘data’ or ‘statistics’ in them,” said one of the laid-off employees, a social scientist whom KFF Health News agreed not to name because the person feared further recrimination. “It was random, as far as we can tell.”
Among those fired was Kendall Swenson, who had led development of the poverty guidelines for many years and was considered the repository of knowledge on the issue, according to the social scientist and two academics who have worked with the HHS team.
The sacking of the office could lead to cuts in assistance to low-income families next year unless the Trump administration restores the positions or moves its duties elsewhere, said Robin Ghertner, the fired director of the Division of Data and Technical Analysis, which had overseen the guidelines.
The poverty guidelines are “needed by many people and programs,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor emeritus of economics at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. “If you’re thinking of someone you fired who should be rehired, Swenson would be a no-brainer,” he added.
Under a 1981 appropriations bill, HHS is required annually to take Census Bureau poverty-line figures, adjust them for inflation, and create guidelines that agencies and states use to determine who is eligible for various types of help.
There’s a special sauce for creating the guidelines that includes adjustments and calculations, Ghertner said. Swenson and three other staff members would independently prepare the numbers and quality-check them together before they were issued each January.
Everyone in Ghertner’s office was told last week, without warning, that they were being put on administrative leave until June 1, when their employment would officially end, he said.
“There’s literally no one in the government who knows how to calculate the guidelines,” he said. “And because we’re all locked out of our computers, we can’t teach anyone how to calculate them.”
ASPE had about 140 staff members and now has about 40, according to a former staffer. The HHS shake-up merged the office with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ, whose staff has shrunk from 275 to about 80, according to a former AHRQ official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
HHS has said it laid off about 10,000 employees and that, combined with other moves, including a program to encourage early retirements, its workforce has been reduced by about 20,000. But the agency has not detailed where it made the cuts or identified specific employees it fired.
“These workers were told they couldn’t come into their offices so there’s no transfer of knowledge,” said Wendell Primus, who worked at ASPE during the Bill Clinton administration. “They had no time to train anyone, transfer data, etc.”
HHS did not respond to a request for comment. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has so far declined to testify about the staff reductions before congressional committees that oversee much of his agency. On April 9, a delegation of 10 Democratic members of Congress waited fruitlessly for a meeting in the agency’s lobby.
The group was led by House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee ranking member Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), who told reporters afterward that Kennedy must appear before the committee “and tell us what his plan is for keeping America healthy and for stopping these devastating cuts.”
Matt VanHyfte, a spokesperson for the Republican committee leadership, said HHS officials would meet with bipartisan committee staff on April 11 to discuss the firings and other policy issues.
ASPE serves as a think tank for the HHS secretary, said Primus, who later was Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s senior health policy adviser for 18 years. In addition to the poverty guidelines, the office maps out how much Medicaid money goes to each state and reviews all regulations developed by HHS agencies.
“These HHS staffing cuts — 20,000 — obviously they are completely nuts,” Primus said. “These were not decisions made by Kennedy or staff at HHS. They are being made at the White House. There’s no rhyme or reasons to what they’re doing.”
HHS leaders may be unaware of their legal duty to issue the poverty guidelines, Ghertner said. If each state and federal government agency instead sets guidelines on its own, it could create inequities and lead to lawsuits, he said.
And sticking with the 2025 standard next year could put benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk, Ghertner said. The current poverty level is $15,650 for a single person and $32,150 for a family of four.
“If you make $30,000 and have three kids, say, and next year you make $31,000 but prices have gone up 7%, suddenly your $31,000 doesn’t buy you the same,” he said, “but if the guidelines haven’t increased, you might be no longer eligible for Medicaid.”
The 2025 poverty level for a family of five is $37,650.
As of October, about 79 million people were enrolled in Medicaid or the related Children’s Health Insurance Program, both of which are means-tested and thus depend on the poverty guidelines to determine eligibility.
Eligibility for premium subsidies for insurance plans sold in Affordable Care Act marketplaces is also tied to the official poverty level.
One in eight Americans rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, and 40% of newborns and their mothers receive food through the Women, Infants, and Children program, both of which also use the federal poverty level to determine eligibility.
Former employees in the office said they were not disloyal to the president. They knew their jobs required them to follow the administration’s objectives. “We were trying to support the MAHA agenda,” the social scientist said, referring to Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” rubric. “Even if it didn’t align with our personal worldviews, we wanted to be useful.”
Just a fairly silly Cynical Ideation here. What if this was a stealth attack on both American Labour and “guest workers?”
Step 1: Start deporting masses of “illegals.” (They being those who fill the lowest rungs of the employment ladder in America. This because “native” Americans know that those jobs pay a sub-subsistence wage.)
Step 2: Begin forcing working age Americans off of Social Safety Net programs. (Here by eliminating key nodes of functionality of the system itself. The above is a case in point.)
Step 3: Begin an “Information Awareness Program” that disseminates the meme that Americans who will not take any job, no matter how dangerous, degrading, or poorly paid are “Dead Beats,” “Useless Eaters,” and or “Deplorables deserving of death.”
Soon, with these tools available, America can fulfil the long-term goal of the revanchist capitalist class of returning America to the halcyon days of the Robber Barons.
>>>>the meme that Americans who will not take any job, no matter how dangerous, degrading, or poorly paid are “Dead Beats,” “Useless Eaters,” and or “Deplorables deserving of death.”
Thank you, ambrit. As you already know, this meme has been used over and over again throughout u.s. history to justify not only cuts to the social safety net, but also the importing of labor to do the jobs Americans don’t want. Think Reagan’s cadillac-driving welfare queens, which is a repeat of what we who grew up in the south heard about Blacks. One relatively recent story, sometime in the early 2010s, comes to mind. In it, WA state fruit growers were bemoaning that Americans didn’t want to take the physically demanding jobs of being fruit pickers, so they had to import the labor. Even more recently, as in two years ago, a Bulgarian immigrant I know who is a painting contractor was complaining that he couldn’t get enough workers to take his well-paying jobs (his words, not mine).
WA State has a minimum wage that adjusts every year; it’s $16.66 per hour for 2025, barely enough to pay rent and cover food costs, etc., in Spokane where I’m located. Since Trump is so focused on deporting the very labor which businesses say they need, his policies seem to be taking us to “the long-term goal of the revanchist capitalist class of returning America to the halcyon days of the Robber Barons” you mention.
Greetings. Here in the North American Deep south’s “half horse town[s],” the minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour. I still hear of businesses that offer that as the starting wage. During the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic, the generally out of town managed retail and fast food outlets offered significantly higher wages to attract workers. In a rarely seen deflationary move, those wages actually later dropped. From what I can gather from personal conversations “on the street,” the local minimum wage has settled somewhere around $10 USD the hour.
I know not whether it is a sign of a stubbornly low wage on offer or a severe lack of competent available workers, but I am still seeing “Workers Wanted” signs in the windows of local retail establishments.
Stay safe!
Cynical ideation? Sounds more like realism and logical consequences of the material situation to me.
That is the scary part to anyone who harbours any hopes for America being a “civilized” nation.
As Claude Rain’s character in “Casablanca” tells Rick: “I’m only a poor corrupt official.” Rains character in the film is a policeman working for Vichy France. That tells us where America has already sunk too. When I peer over the edge of the chasm we have wandered up to, I cannot see the bottom. That worries me.
After the poors (like myself) find that all the Chinese goods that helped them manage have doubled in price…
The ranks of poors will be going up, but the technical data will be MIA.
How about firing the government staff that sets up, administers, and determines the benefits Congress and the President and Supreme Court receive and are eligible for? No more payroll-health coverage-retirement pension-tax payer provided security-free pharmacy inside Senate chambers. Not even badges to swipe yourself into buildings. They’d all have to live on their insider trading and legalized by Supreme Court bribes. So tragic I might cry if I continue writing. But…It’s only fair
“Badges?! We don’t need no steenking badges!” I suggest pitchforks….
Will the words “Class War” make it back into mainstream lexicon?
Warren Buffet (for it is he) said this in 2006:
Good, honest, freedom-loving red-blooded Americans, do you have guns?
You can sell them and each may buy a week or two worth of food.
Where will that leave you and yours?
What happens when illusions and self-delusions cannot be maintained, and you actually are forced to make choices that will be life-defining and have real consequences?
We might not be ready to go there, but we are going there, and all of us– rich or poor living in USA– will be there very soon.
Welcome to the animal kingdom.
Our Dear Leader has eliminated poverty with the stroke of a pen!
No calculation — no poverty!
This is pretty genius, as it uses liberal Democrat/technocratic complex eligibility requirements, already designed to punish poors, further against the poors and the programs themselves.
This is Machiavellian level of epic.
Imagine if Democrats… sigh, never mind.
This is Trump once again saying the quiet part out loud, “Go Die”.
Since he is saying this to half or more of the US Population, enthusiastic cooperation may too much to expect.
Particularly in the “Red” States which will be hit very hard.
By poors we mean ‘deplorables’. I think it’s important to draw out that the democrats also took a dim view to the rabble, the out group they took such great pains to bracket and to differentiate as other than themselves, to highlight that the poors should remain unheard, unconsidered and most importantly in a so-called democracy, purposefully unrepresented by a government which is allegedly supposed to represent all.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people ideologically opposed to capitalism were rarely wealthy. They’re the ones who become teachers, doctors, nurses, caregivers, ecologists, etc., and all of these are under attack.
A bit of a tangent, Bernie has a Herculean task to turn the Democrats around, but it would probably be a good idea to at least identify those who call any groups deplorable in order to dismiss them, and those who don’t understand government, if not a dictatorship, is supposed to represent all. This would at least start to reverse the above described trends.
Hey, at least Trump and his administration aren’t being hypocritical — they were honest before the election about their bad intentions regarding tariffs, punishing perceived political enemies, extending tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, etc.
I kept reading on this blog, mainly from Lambert, that at least Trump and the modern Republican Party are honest, whereas the Democrat Party was the object of nonstop criticism for its hypocrisy in only pretending to care about anyone besides its big money donors, for being the party of the PMC and for its misguided commitment to identity politics. This blog had worse things to say about Kamala Harris than about Donald Trump prior to the election.
This idea that hypocrisy is the worst sin reminds me of a Norm MacDonald anecdote. Patton Oswalt opined to Norm that the worst thing about Bill Cosby was Cosby’s hypocrisy, to which Norm responded, “No, it wasn’t. The worst thing about Cosby was the raping.”
Why pen critiques now that a presidential administration is following through on implementing an agenda that didn’t raise a lot of red flags before the election?
Revisionist history, big time. I checked with Lambert, who was paying close attention, and he has no recollection of Trump promising tariffs. Nor did he say he’d destroy Social Security, escalate in the Middle East, fail to deliver on his getting a deal in Ukraine or “president of peace” blather, worsen inflation and create shortages (soon to come!), wreck the VA, harm Federal parks by gutting staffing…this list goes on. And he never said he’d grift on an unheard of scale via his memecoins or giving billionaires advance notice of his policy changes (as the size of trades placed before his tariff climbdown shows), deport Americans to gulag hell holes without due process, or act as a dictator, which is his conduct now.
So yes, Trump is a much much much worse hypocrite. The reason that matter is voters were mislead to a far far greater degree than with “normal” candidates.
Agree on everything but tariffs.
‘In 2024, the then-candidate promised to levy duties of 10% to 20% on US trading partners and 60% on China. He also said at one point, “I don’t need Congress … I’ll have the right to impose them myself.”‘ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wall-street-comes-to-a-painful-realization-trump-was-serious-about-steep-tariffs-all-along-080044887.html
and
10/20/24: Trump’s trade rhetoric may not be all bluster. He needs mammoth tariffs to pay for everything else he wants. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trumps-trade-rhetoric-may-not-be-all-bluster-he-needs-mammoth-tariffs-to-pay-for-everything-else-he-wants-184020428.html
I don’t recall this being made a big deal of by the MSM, though. It seems it was an integral part of his economic plan, if you can call it that.
Trump also didn’t say he will not do all those things enumerated. He promised America First and he claimed he’s a genius that can do any deal. Except pay his contractors and lawyer…
Trump explicitly said that Social Security and Medicare would not be touched.
He also promised to end Government Censorship and end the War in Ukraine.
He did not mention the VA because not even the most insane Democrat would overtly gut the VA after decades of pious “Support the Troops” language..
Did you miss the “Truth Social” Post when he declared that he was now the King?
He wasn’t joking.
And he is now overtly defying the Courts, which he may well get away with due to a corrupt Supreme Court.
Harlan Crow bought “Justice” Thomas with a used book and a Winnebago FFS.
Because of the DOGE cutting expenses, he is now the King and the Court Jester.
Oops, my mental math is not very good – utilities at $ 250/month is not $ 1,000 a year, it is $ 3,000 a year. This only strengthens the argument that a couple with two kids making $ 60,000 a year is way, way under water pretty much anywhere in the United States.