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Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the deciding vote to pass Republicans' massive social safety net cuts through the Senate. She said she didn't like the bill, but voted for it anyway after getting Alaska exempted from some of its worst harms.
By the thinnest possible margin, the U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to pass a budget that includes the largest cuts to Medicaid and nutrition assistance in U.S. history while giving trillions of dollars of tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
The deciding vote was Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who admitted she didn't like the bill. However, she voted for it regardless after securing relief for her home state from some of its most draconian cuts.
But in an interview immediately afterward, she acknowledged that the rest of the country, where millions are on track to lose their healthcare coverage and food assistance, would not be so lucky.
"Do I like this bill? No," Murkowski told a reporter for MSNBC. "I try to take care of Alaska's interests. I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don't like that."
The 887-page bill includes more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program over the next decade—cuts the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects will result in nearly 12 million people losing health coverage. The measure also takes an ax to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—imperiling food aid for millions.
In recent days, Murkowski—a self-described "Medicaid moderate"—expressed hesitation about signing onto a list of such devastating cuts, calling the vote "agonizing". To get her on board, her Republican colleagues were willing to give her state some shelter from the coming storm.
As David Dayen explained in The American Prospect, Murkowski was able to secure a waiver that exempts Alaska from the newly implemented cost-sharing requirement that will force states to spend more of their budgets on SNAP.
In The New Republic, Robert McCoy described it as a "bribe."
Initially, Republicans attempted to simply write in a carve-out for Alaska and Hawaii. But after this was shot down by the Senate parliamentarian, they tried again with a measure that exempted the 10 states with the highest error rates.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) called it "the most absurd example of the hypocrisy of the Republican bill."
"They have now proposed delaying SNAP cuts FOR TWO YEARS ONLY FOR STATES with the highest error rates just to bury their help for Alaska," she said.
Murkowski also got a tax break for Alaskan fishing villages inserted into the bill. She attempted to have Alaska exempted from some Medicaid cuts as well, but the parliamentarian killed the measure.
"Did I get everything that I wanted? Absolutely not," she told reporters outside the Senate chamber.
However, as Dayen wrote, "Murkowski decided that she could live with a bill that takes food and medicine from vulnerable people to fund tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, as long as it didn't take quite as much food away from Alaskans."
Murkowski showed herself to be well aware of the harms the bill will cause. After voting to pass the bill, she said, "My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we're not there yet."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called Murkowski's bargain "selfish," "cruel," and "expensive."
"Voting for the bill because [of] a carve-out for your state is open acknowledgement that people will get kicked off healthcare and will have to go to much more expensive emergency rooms," Jayapal wrote. "Clear you know it's a terrible bill for everyone."
Universalism is the only governing strategy strong enough to rebuild what Trumpism has corroded—not as a slogan, but as a material commitment.
She shows up just after 9:00 am, like she has most mornings since the letter arrived. The lobby is already full—mothers with strollers, older men gripping folders, a teenager in a hoodie with his eyes on the floor. She clutches the same folder she’s been carrying for weeks: pay stubs, proof of residency, a note from her landlord warning the rent will rise again. Her name will be called eventually. And when it is, a caseworker will skim her paperwork, ask a few quick questions, and decide whether she qualifies—for what, she’s not even sure anymore. Rent relief? Help with the electric bill? A food pantry referral? Maybe nothing.
This is what public help looks like in America: a maze, a line, a thousand little gates. Each with a lock that shifts depending on your zip code, your paperwork, or whether the system deems you deserving. Our safety net isn’t built to catch—it’s built to sort. And that structure—the means-tested, piecemeal logic of American social policy—hasn’t just failed to prevent collapse. It has laid the groundwork for authoritarianism.
President Donald Trump came to power on the promise to fight for the forgotten working class—for people like those in that lobby. Millions believed him. Not because they were fooled, but because the institutions that should have offered stability—unions, schools, housing, healthcare—were already gone. What remained were brittle bureaucracies that asked everything, offered little, and always arrived too late.
We cannot out-message collapse. We must out-govern it.
Trump didn’t fill that vacuum with solutions. He filled it with vengeance. Not policy that delivered—but posture that blamed. While Republicans translated grievance into governing power, Democrats lost their map.
After 2024, the party was hollowed out. Young men walked away. Working-class voters of every background followed. The party that once stood for labor and civil rights began to feel like the party of college towns and tax credits. People didn’t switch sides—they stopped believing anyone was on theirs.
In that vacuum, the Abundance Agenda gained traction. Promoted by liberal technocrats, it focuses on clearing bureaucratic thickets: zoning reform, streamlined permitting, housing acceleration. Build more. Build faster. Let growth lift all boats.
But abundance doesn’t ask who’s in the boat—and who keeps getting thrown overboard. It solves for scarcity without addressing exclusion. It tackles supply, not distribution. It removes friction but doesn’t restore trust. Growth is not solidarity. Innovation is not inclusion. And no one will rally behind a politics that treats them as consumers before recognizing them as neighbors or workers.
Now, in his second term, Trump no longer pretends. He is using the federal government not to build—but to punish. Agencies are purged. Civil rights protections erased. Grants come with loyalty tests. Through executive orders and loyalist appointments, he is dismantling the federal infrastructure of inclusion, plank by plank.
This isn’t small government. It’s selective government—enforcement without support, punishment without provision. It survives because public systems remain fractured and cruel. When your right to basic services depends on proving your worth, solidarity dies. People stop defending each other’s needs. They’re too busy proving their own.
The single mother in the lobby doesn’t call this authoritarianism. She doesn’t have to. She feels it in the form that changes overnight. In the disconnected phone numbers. In the line she waits in each morning—only to be told again: You don’t qualify.
Abundance won’t help her.
Zoning reform won’t keep her housed.
Solar panels won’t make her feel seen.
She doesn’t need a productivity agenda. She needs a government that shows up.
Because this is how democracy unravels—not in a cataclysm, but in the quiet, daily normalization of abandonment.
Trump must be stopped. But we won’t defeat authoritarianism with messaging. Not with moral clarity. Not with speeches. Democrats will not win by being right. They will win by delivering.
Universalism is the only governing strategy strong enough to rebuild what Trumpism has corroded—not as a slogan, but as a material commitment. We cannot out-message collapse. We must out-govern it.
Ask that woman in the lobby what failed, and she won’t name a policy theory. She’ll say: the office stopped calling. The money vanished. The form changed. Beneath that is something deeper: a belief that survival must be earned. That belonging must be begged for. And once that belief takes hold, it doesn’t just break programs. It breaks democracy.
Because when help is conditional, it becomes contestable. When people compete for scraps, they stop believing in the public. They stop believing in each other. When democracy fails, it’s not because people stop believing in freedom.
It’s because freedom stops being useful.
A ballot won’t quiet a hungry child. A speech won’t refill a prescription.
If democracy is to survive, it must show up in people’s lives.
And to show up, it must trust them first.
That woman is still waiting. Not for charity—for recognition. For someone to say: You matter. You belong. You should not have to beg to be seen. Universalism answers that hope. Not with pity, but with presence. Not with exceptions, but with guarantees. It does not ask what she did wrong. It simply says: You are part of this country. You are not alone.
Because if this republic is to endure, it won’t be because people begged for help.
It will be because we chose to build a government that finally refused to look away.
We chose to show up—not with hesitation, not with disclaimers, but with resolve.
Because in a nation this rich, no one should have to stand in line just to be seen.
No one should have to plead for the dignity that should already be theirs.
Study after study shows that government assistance with food, healthcare, and housing makes tangible, positive impacts on people’s lives, from newborns to the elderly.
Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
That was a lie, and it was a deadly one.
Like so much of what came out of Reagan’s mouth, this clever quip provided a folksy façade for a brutal attack on the most vulnerable Americans. Before Reagan’s election in 1980, homeless shelters and evictions were rare. Then Reagan and a compliant Congress laid waste to our nation’s safety net, including cutting investment in affordable housing by nearly 80%.
As many of our clinic clients can attest, well-trained, dedicated experts who answer to the people instead of some wealthy donors are the gold standard for housing inspection and code enforcement.
The U.S. commitment to affordable housing has never fully recovered. Urban policy scholar Peter Dreier lays the blame where it belongs: “Every park bench in America—everywhere a homeless person sleeps—should have Ronald Reagan’s name on it.”
This vicious Reagan legacy is important to remember as President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans trot out the same anti-government talking points to support a legislative agenda that would gut healthcare and food programs.
The government-harms shtick is just as false today as in Reagan’s time. Study after study shows that government assistance with food, healthcare, and housing makes tangible, positive impacts on people’s lives, from newborns to the elderly. And government programs deliver these essential services more efficiently and inexpensively than private charity programs, not to mention at a scale that even the most ambitious billionaire philanthropy can only dream of.
Our law school clinic’s work representing people facing eviction and living in unsafe and unhealthy rental housing provides us with a very specific example of government working well.
In our community as in many others, a local government agency is tasked with ensuring the safety of housing, including rental housing. Here, the agency is called the Marion County Public Health Department. (Indianapolis is located within Marion County.)
Our clients can simply call the agency’s phone number for housing inspections and describe the situation in their rented home, a situation that far too often includes mold, infestation with bugs or rodents, no heat during the winter, gas leaks, and more. A trained inspector will then come out to the home within days and issue a formal report and notice to the landlord soon after. This article includes a sample of those reports. As you can see, it includes the threat of substantial fines.
The inspectors’ reports often spur landlords to fix the problems. When they don’t, the agency can and does file a lawsuit against the landlord. Tenants can also file a claim of their own asking for rent offset or other damages due to the unsafe, unhealthy conditions.
Low-income tenants face a power imbalance: Landlords are far more wealthy than tenants, have access to attorneys that tenants rarely do, and of course control continued access to the very roof over tenants’ heads. But when this government agency intervenes, it flips the script, putting pressure on landlords to bring the housing up to code.
The agency is not perfect, of course. Our clinic and other advocates have joined with City County councilors to advocate for the agency to reverse their policy of dropping inspections and enforcement after tenants move out. But one of the defining characteristics of government programs is a benefit that no nonprofit agency can ever match: They are accountable to the community. Ultimately, that accountability is exercised at the ballot box for the agency leaders or those who appoint them.
So the advocacy here has borne fruit and the agency now continues to do its important scrutiny even after tenants move out.
The current revival of anti-government sentiment has impacted this local public health agency, with the Republican-controlled state legislature cutting its funding by more than 70%. More of the playbook from the president who asked in 1982, “Wouldn’t it be better for the human spirit and for the soul of this nation to encourage people to accept more responsibility to care for one another, rather than leaving those tasks to paid bureaucrats?”
Nope. As many of our clinic clients can attest, well-trained, dedicated experts who answer to the people instead of some wealthy donors are the gold standard for housing inspection and code enforcement. Those inspectors are from the government, and they are here to help.