I think one of the mistakes political opponents and media critics frequently make when analyzing Trump and what he's done to the GOP, is to present Downmarket Mussolini as outsider and an aberration from traditional Republican Party politics. Which isn't to say Trump doesn't represent an acceleration of the fascist tendencies that have long been brewing in right wing American politics (like Goldwater-long, at least) but the successful Christian Nationalist political project Trumpism now represents here in the Swine Emperor's second term, has successfully integrated most of the GOP's longstanding political projects and ideas right alongside the more openly white nationalist objectives of guys like Stephen Miller. A good example of this would be the way the Republican Party has successfully revived its decades-long experiment with adding work requirements to social assistance programs, by integrating them into homicidal budget cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, totaling more than a trillion dollars over the next ten years.

Let me assure you as someone who lived through the 'Red" conquest of the Midwest, and Rick Synder's austerity regime in Michigan, that work requirements do not at all "work" in the way libertarian freakjobs insist they do. This is because marginalization, and poverty are systemic in America and we do not fund programs like Medcaid and SNAP because "people are lazy and just don't want you to work" as Koch-topus propagandists would have you believe. The reality is that Republicans know that, and have always known it; the purpose here isn't really to weed out abuse but simply to force more people off social assistance no matter how terrible the outcomes are. And they are terrible, literally everywhere they've been adopted these policies have failed across all sorts of social assistance programs; state level schemes in Arkansas and Georgia that linked work requirements to Medicaid in particular already flopped, doing "little to boost employment while depriving many of health coverage."

Furthermore, as labor policy analyst Matt Bruenig points out, tying medical assistance to employment disempowers workers, and increases labor precarity as a result of decisions made by employers and corporations. Indeed, one of the only reasons a private healthcare system like America's can even "function," is to use programs like Medicaid as a backstop when workers lose their company insurance plans due to unemployment; and now the Republican Party wants to rip that safety net away, and hand even more power to the bosses.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/house-gop-work-requirements

Policy Expert Details Cruelty and Pointlessness of GOP's Medicaid Work Requirements

"Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, a left-wing think tank, argued in his Times op-ed that "imposing work requirements on Medicaid is a fundamentally misguided policy," particularly given that "it is employers, not workers, who make hiring, firing, and scheduling decisions."

"Last year, over 20 million workers were laid off or fired at some point from their jobs," Bruenig observed. "Many of those workers ended up losing not just all of their income but also their employer-sponsored health care. Medicaid is supposed to provide a backstop for these workers, but if we tie eligibility to work, they will find themselves locked out of the healthcare system because of decisions their employers made, often for reasons beyond their control."

To underscore the absurdity of forcing vulnerable people to document adequate work hours in order to receive public benefits, Bruenig wrote that "our society could decide that police and fire departments will not respond to calls made by individuals who worked less than 80 hours in the prior month, but most would find this repugnant and contrary to the purpose of these services."

As Bruenig goes on to note on the article, this is basically a solution in search of a problem; or rather the problem this solution solves has nothing to do with preventing Medicaid abuse and everything to do with legitimizing anti-labor class war propaganda about welfare leeches while further empowering the tyranny of the employer class.

So, let's just review okay? Work requirement policies, particularly tied to Medcaid, don't increase employment because propaganda about abuse by "lazy grifters" isn't real. They are also terrible for labor class people because the invariably result in huge numbers of people simply not being able to qualify for assistance, which of course has some pretty serious consequences if we're talking Medicaid assistance. But work requirements *do* make bosses more powerful because workers are more precarious and the money saved by denying coverage to people who should qualify should allow Marc Andreessen to buy a new yacht.

Well, I can see why Republicans love the "big beautiful" bill; it's everything they've wanted since the fall of the Berlin Wall.