The Party of Denialism

The Party of ‘Denihilism’

Republicans are rejecting reality while embracing destruction—just
look at the House budget megabill.

Jill Lawrence
May 23, 2025

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/republican-party-denihilism-gop-budget-bill-medicaid-snap?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

THE HOUSE REPUBLICANS’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” is big, at over a
thousand pages. But is it beautiful? Not in the eyes of this beholder.

All I can see when I look at it is “denihilism,” a word my former boss
at USA Today, Bill Sternberg, used this week in an article about
climate change, the coming hurricane season, and the many ways the
Trump administration has weakened and destabilized federal weather
forecasting and disaster response agencies.

These actions, Bill wrote,

appear driven by a combination of scientific denial (if you pretend a
problem like climate change doesn’t exist, then you don’t have to do
anything about it, particularly anything that would offend fossil fuel
interests) and ideological nihilism (taking a perverse pleasure in
inflicting trauma on federal employees and watching the world burn).
Call it denihilism.

The gigantic House budget bill that passed by one vote is denihilism
to the max. On climate alone, it would roll back Biden-era clean
energy incentives and programs, resulting in over 800,000 lost jobs,
increased climate-warming pollution, and rising electricity prices—a
triple threat to workers, public health, and the cost of living. Not
to mention setbacks to U.S. progress in clean-energy manufacturing.

The 215–214 vote came hours after a stock selloff sparked by analyses
showing the bill’s tax component—extending, expanding, and reviving
provisions of the 2017 tax law—would increase U.S. debt by $3 trillion
to $5 trillion over ten years, with interest costs approaching
one-third of all federal revenues, amid downgrades of U.S.
creditworthiness.

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While most of the tax benefits go to upper-income households, most of
the savings proposed to offset about a third of the tax-revenue losses
would penalize lower-income Americans by cutting roughly $1.1 trillion
in health coverage and food benefits. And they would be cut in a
deceptive way—by increasing red tape and paperwork to the point where
stressed, needy, busy people just give up.

The GOP plan, public policy professors Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan
wrote this week, relies on “opaque cuts, which will shed millions of
eligible beneficiaries by overwhelming them with pointless paperwork
and other needlessly complicated administrative requirements.” They
are less obvious than outright cuts, but they’ll have the same
effect—making it “impossible for eligible clients to access the safety
net.”

Republicans aren’t stopping at adding work requirements and
administrative burdens to Medicaid, the health insurance program (no
cash handouts) that’s a lifeline to hospitals and over 70 million
low-income people, almost all of whom are kids, parents, disabled, or
already working. They’re also reversing years of reforms to ease
enrollment and renewals—“simplifying applications, eliminating
confusing paperwork and automating processes,” Herd and Moynihan note.

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THE GOP BILL TAKES THE SAME APPROACH to the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP), known as food stamps, that 40 million
children, seniors, and disabled adults count on. Republicans are
counting on the burden of work requirements to pare participation and
costs, and on states to find money to pay an increased share of the
joint federal-state program.

The knock-on effects of all of this can hardly be overstated. There’s
solid evidence that these kinds of complexity can stunt and wreck
lives, a concept I wrote about in connection with the fiftieth
anniversary of the War on Poverty in 2014:

In Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, economist Sendhil
Mullainathan of Harvard and psychologist Eldar Shafir of Princeton
show that simply feeling poor makes it very hard to think clearly.
Their studies found the same dramatic results whether the subjects
were Indian sugarcane farmers or shoppers at a New Jersey mall.
Feeling rich (the farmers who were studied after their harvests, for
instance) resulted in good performance on intelligence tests. Feeling
poor produced much worse results.

Worries about not having enough money, it turns out, can subtract 13
IQ points from your mental capacity or “bandwidth,” as the authors
call it. That’s a more profound effect than losing a full night’s
sleep.

The upside of the research is that the scarcity-perpetuating-scarcity
problem can be fixed. “Starting from the premise that programs for
people in need should use as little mental bandwidth as possible, the
potential for policy remedies is clear,” I wrote. For instance, for
people eligible for multiple programs, a one-stop shop open for long
hours would relieve stress by reducing time spent on public
transportation, in waiting rooms, and away from jobs.

Unfortunately for us, we now have a Republican party determined to
make policy remedies as complicated as possible, knowing and perhaps
even intending that the result will be more scarcity. How can that
possibly help the country?

The GOP safety-net plans, not surprisingly, are wildly unpopular. Data
for Progress, a progressive polling firm, found overwhelming
opposition to SNAP cuts in every single congressional district in the
country. Less than 15 percent of likely voters in each district
support the cuts, the firm said Thursday.

It’s true that some parts of the GOP megabill enjoy broad support.
Eliminating federal income taxes on tips and overtime, in line with
Donald Trump’s campaign promises, is in the bill, at least for now.
The exemption only lasts through 2028, and it could disrupt the labor
market, and safety-net cuts could cancel out any advantage to
families, but it’s one of the only appealing talking points available
to Republicans. If they end up keeping it.

As for Democrats, those safety-net cuts are a political layup. Senate
Republicans might prevent the worst, but 215 House Republicans are
already on record as voting for it. And, as the fictional detective
Harry Bosch’s mantra goes, “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

He’s talking about bringing justice in equal measure in all his cases.
We should be making sure all Americans have the opportunity to live
their best lives, instead of making sure we shower the most generous
tax cuts on people who need them least.