Cross-national research on social policy and welfare states over the past five decades has proven invaluable in helping us to understand why some nations have been more successful than others in reducing social inequality and promoting the well-being of their populations. To date, this research has largely focused on the character and impact of two central pillars of social support: income transfers and social services.
The networks of transfer payments that constitute the welfare state’s first pillar, including unemployment insurance, accident insurance, pensions, child allowances and social assistance, provide income to people who have temporarily or permanently left the paid labour force, or otherwise require economic assistance. The welfare state’s second pillar is made up of various forms of social services, such as the care economy services of healthcare, childcare and elderly care, as well as decommodified provisions such as education, social housing and public transportation.
But there is a third central, and largely unacknowledged, welfare state pillar: protective legislation. Its criticality has been recently underscored in the United States, where the second Trump administration has activated an aggressive and encompassing strategy of deregulation. Under his auspices, it has attacked the country’s entire system of laws and regulatory agencies, as well as the networks of research institutes and services that inform, support and animate them. Major cuts to crucial income programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and social services, such as Medicaid, were widely anticipated as a means to offset the proposed extension of massive tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans introduced in 2017. However, the breadth, magnitude, and speed of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the third welfare state pillar were largely unforeseen and, when recognized by academics and the media, has been largely addressed in episodic fits and starts that centre specific agencies, rather than on the systemic erosion of the third pillar which has long been a target of corporate capital and conservative think tanks. This article provides an overview of the role and history of protective legislation as a critical ‘third’ welfare state pillar. It then turns to an examination of the unprecedented offensive currently well underway in the US to obliterate it.
The Critical Role of the Welfare State’s Third Pillar
The complex systems of protective legislation and acts, legal rights, and regulatory laws that comprise the third pillar exist in every social policy area and across all developed welfare states. As with income programs and social services, there can be striking cross-national variation in their design, goals, prosecution and impact, but they can be as central to securing our well-being and promoting greater equality as the benefits and provisions that constitute the first and second pillars.
In the labour market and workplace policy domains, for example, the third pillar includes minimum wage laws, workplace health and safety laws, child labour laws, rights to paid vacations and holidays, legislation outlawing discriminatory hiring practices, fair labour standards acts and ‘right to disconnect’ laws. In the housing policy domain, the third pillar encompasses building codes, zoning by-laws, rent control, eviction protection legislation and national and subnational laws recently introduced in several countries to impede the rampant financialization of housing. In the health policy area, it includes networks of laws that set health standards, monitor and uphold the quality of our air and water, and regulate the production, packaging, labelling, distribution, marketing and sale of innumerable commodities and household goods, from food, to cosmetics, to clothing.
The third pillar also embraces broad constellations of legal interventions to redress the complex composite challenges that confront structurally-disadvantaged groups with protracted and sustained histories of legal and extralegal forms of abuse, discrimination and exclusion. Third pillar protections for children, for example – including suites of laws addressing child neglect, abandonment, exploitation, sexual abuse, corporal punishment, child labour and looming online harms – are as critical to child well-being as income and care programs such as child allowances and high-quality childcare and education. For people with disabilities, third pillar legislation addresses various forms of discrimination and exclusion such as laws that promote inclusion by mandating the provision of elevators, accessible parking for public accommodations and commercial facilities, and requiring or encouraging access to Braille, sign language interpreters and assistive technologies. The resolution of the interrelated risks, barriers and issues that these groups encounter daily requires robust and binding legislation, in addition to close policy coordination across all welfare state pillars and multiple policy domains.
The protective laws and measures that constitute the third pillar are closely related to, but notably distinct from, those that establish and shape the policy frameworks in the first and second pillars because their ability to promote greater equality and safeguard our well-being is not primarily achieved through enabling and determining the conditions and terms for the provision of income transfers or social services. Within the labour market policy domain, for example, Canada’s first pillar Employment Insurance Act, with its attendant sets of rules specifying eligibility and qualifying conditions, benefit levels, and the length of waiting and compensation periods for receipt of Employment Insurance (EI) transfer payments, is clearly different from the third pillar’s Canada Labour Code; an act of parliament that sets labor standards, promotes safe working conditions and protects workers from unjust dismissal. Within the health policy domain, the Canada Health Act sets out the foundation and guiding principles for the provision of healthcare (comprehensiveness, universality, public provision, portability and accessibility), a second pillar social service. This is decidedly distinct from third pillar protective legislation such as the Food and Drug Act, which regulates the production and sale of food, drugs and a wide range of other commodities.
Despite their centrality to our wellbeing, third pillar measures are rarely addressed in comparative welfare state research. Among the innumerable studies of the character and consequences of specific laws, rights and measures, few attend to them as key components of welfare states or investigate how they may mutually reinforce and augment first and second pillars provisions or even serve to undermine them. Weak eviction laws, for example, provide few protections for tenants, allowing landlords to more easily evict them and increase rental rates for new tenants. Without legislation that effectively forestalls the financialization of housing, large institutional investors, corporate landlords and real estate investment trusts (REITs) can readily buy up large stocks of residential housing and raise rents.
These laws have resulted in a depletion in the stock of affordable housing and a decrease in the real value of housing allowances, social assistance and other first pillar income supports, contributing to the ongoing housing crisis in Canada and many other wealthy nations. (August, 2022; Farha, 2017; Hartman and Robinson, 2003) In contrast, strong ‘just cause’ eviction laws can restrict a landlord’s ability to evict people without valid reason, protecting tenants from arbitrary, discriminatory, and retaliatory evictions, and help prevent rising rates of homelessness. Third pillar measures are also rarely invoked in the development of welfare state typologies, or the conception of welfare state models or ‘families,’ which are still largely defined by the essence and impact of their income supports and social services. Few studies closely contrast the divergent character, adherence to, and impact of the systems of protective laws across nations and welfare state families in any single policy area, much less across entire welfare states. (Olsen, 2019b, 2024a, 2024b)
While closely related to the policy measures in the first and second pillars, third pillar laws are typically more proactive and preventive, engaging with emerging or potential problems and issues further upstream. They can, for example, greatly reduce the possibility of people becoming seriously ill; getting injured in the workplace; or being evicted, unhoused and exposed to new and compounding risks that undermine physical and mental well-being. Consequently, they are more cost-effective than long-term disability benefits for injured workers, complex courses of prescription medications and protracted periods in hospitals to address chronic illnesses, or the extensive range of expenses associated with evictions and homelessness (e.g., shelters, storage facilities, food banks, healthcare, and court costs).
Nations with more developed welfare states that address homelessness via congruent and coordinated measures within and across policy domains have been the most strikingly successful.
The most effective way of addressing complex policy issues such as homelessness is through coordinated policies across the three pillars. These include first pillar policies such as housing allowances and utility payment assistance; second pillar policies such as affordable social housing and mental health support; and third pillar policies such as rent control laws and eviction protection measures, along with the cross-pillar promotion of “housing first” as a welfare state priority. (Olsen and Benjaminsen, 2019, Olsen, 2021) Even in nations with residual/liberal-type welfare states, such as Canada and the US, subnational jurisdictions have repeatedly demonstrated the positive impact of preventive laws and other measures. (cf., BC Rent Bank, 2024; Gibbs et al., 2021; Love and Loh, 2023; Phillips and Sullivan, 2023; Troisi and Rausch, 2022; United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, 2024) However, as one of the most definitive ‘composite’ or ‘fusion’ policy issues, homelessness is most effectively addressed through networks of measures across the three pillars of several policy domains, including housing, health, labour market, family, education and transportation policy, (Olsen 2019a, 2019b; Olsen and Benjaminsen 2019; Oudshoorn 2020) Nations with more developed welfare states that address homelessness via congruent and coordinated measures within and across policy domains have been the most strikingly successful. Finland, for example, reduced homelessness by 80 percent between 1986 and 2023. Congruently, the integrated web of measures introduced in the US for veterans resulted in a 50 percent decline in homelessness in that population between 2007 and 2020. (Ara, 2025; Homeless Programs Office/Veterans Health Administration, 2022)
Historical Roots and Impact of Early Third Pillar Laws: Limited Protection and Social Control
Late 16th and 17th century poor laws were among the earliest forms of social support in Europe during the prehistory of the welfare state. England’s 1601 Elizabethan Poor Law constituted a rudimentary, composite amalgamation of all three welfare state pillars, furnishing minimal amounts of cash and in-kind goods (such as food and fuel), activating poor houses and workhouses, and enacting laws that both mandated the provision of support by local parishes and imposed stringent rules and conditions for its receipt. However, after a major overhaul in 1834, the ‘new poor law’ more clearly reflected the ‘doctrine of capitalist accumulation,’ further increasing workers’ dependence on employers and markets, with greater emphasis on social control than on social protection. (Tilton and Furniss, 1979:97) British Fabian Society socialist reformers, Sydney and Beatrice Webb (1927), aptly characterized it as a system of relief within a larger system of repression.
Children have always been among the most vulnerable and exploited groups in capitalist societies. Among the first protective laws in the early industrial era in England were those introduced to address the burgeoning numbers of child chimney sweeps. This work was carried out by children as young as four years of age, often forced to climb naked through the dark, hot networks of chimneys of buildings, breathing in soot, smoke and dust. They suffered mass injuries and fatalities from suffocation, respiratory illnesses, burns, lacerations, abrasions, falls, and carcinoma, as well as beatings, abuse, and neglect by their ‘sweep masters’ who crammed them in poor living conditions. In 1788, the first of a series of laws were introduced to raise the legal age for this work (to eight or ten years of age), but they were all largely unenforced. It would take over eight decades to finally end this form of child labour.
The first laws introduced to protect children in factories, workshops, mines, mills and fields were also easily evaded, or overlooked entirely by official inspectors who might also be their employers. The deplorable and dangerous working conditions for these young ‘pauper apprentices’ is well documented in Britain, Canada, the US, and across Europe. (Bartrip 1985; de Coninck-Smith et al, 1997; Hindman, 2004; Humphries, 2011; Kealey, 1973) However, the incremental accumulation of a series of protective factory worker laws throughout the 19th century saw the gradual emergence of the third pillar as states began to regulate the welfare of workers such as the length of the workday, the age of workers, and compensation for injuries sustained at work. The introduction of the third pillar would also serve to promote the introduction of first and second pillar workplace policies, such as workers’ compensation insurance, disability allowances, rehabilitation programs and healthcare for all workers. Later laws enforcing time off work for children to attend school would be superseded by education laws making school compulsory, in response to both the needs of capital for an educated, socialized labour force in a competitive global economy and the demands of labour and social reform groups. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Olsen 2024b; Soysal and Strang, 1989)
In the housing policy area, Canadian government reports in the late 19th century acknowledged appalling housing conditions, inspector apathy and the undue influence of landlords, but critical building codes, regulations, and sanitation laws would not be enacted until the middle of the next century. In the US, fear of the spread of disease, working-class unrest and the concerns of local elites prompted earlier policy interventions in larger cities. (Madden and Marcuse 2016:121; Guest, 1985) In the densely populated city of New York, a Tenement House Act was introduced in 1867 to protect tenants, requiring fire escapes, windows in every bedroom and a minimum of one toilet per every 20 inhabitants. In the health policy domain, first steps were taken to regulate the use of harmful chemical preservatives and other toxic adulterants in food, as well as fraudulent remedies and ‘quack cures’ routinely peddled in the late 19th century, leading to the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and the creation of one of the most pivotal regulatory bodies in the US, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Like most other early protective policy initiatives, they were strongly resisted by industry and underfunded and underenforced by the state, but they were landmark developments, and a critical foundation wall of all modern welfare states emplaced to protect the working-class. (Hilts, 2004; Light et al., 2013)
Most of the protective measures introduced in the 19th century were limited in their scope and poorly enforced. They did not address the root causes of ongoing problems and could be deployed to monitor, discipline and punish people. This helps to explain why they are often viewed as the very opposite of ‘social protection’ and overlooked in welfare state research today. But some first pillar social supports in liberal welfare states like the United States and Canada, such as social assistance (‘welfare’) have also been stingy, stigmatising, conditional, punitive, narrowly targeted, and closely policed. (Gavigan and Chunn, 2004; Olsen, 2021; Piven and Cloward 1972; Wacquant, 2009; Wright et al., 2020). And few policy interventions are as wholly pernicious as some second pillar measures, such as those associated with eugenics and sterilisation, or the callous compulsory removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities, confinement to residential schools, or involuntary placement in non-Indigenous foster homes for assimilation in Australia, Canada, the United States and other settler-colonial entities. (Adams, 1995; Broberg and Roll-Hansen, 2005; Independent Special Interlocutor, 2024; Lindmark and Olle Sundström, 2018; Minton, 2020; Stote, 2015; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015)
Like the other welfare state pillars, the third pillar also includes networks of critical constitutional and legal rights, protections, and regulatory measures that, to varying degrees, have greatly improved and secured well-being in all social policy domains. The history of capitalism has been an unremitting class struggle, with workers and social reformers attempting to protect people from the excesses of unbridled capitalism by forming labour organizations and political parties. Most of these groups do not call for complete societal transformation, but for the introduction or improvement of social supports and regulations that comprise the three pillars of the modern welfare state. Employers, capitalists and capital, in turn, have undermined these efforts to maximize profits. The character and efficacy of the measures that comprise the three pillars, over time and across the capitalist world, reflect ongoing shifts in the relative strength of these forces in this ongoing struggle and their ability to shape the goals and contours of welfare states.
Well-Being and the Welfare State in the US
Although the United States is one of the richest nations, its relatively anemic welfare state is among the least effective in the wealthy capitalist world. Its first pillar income transfers are relatively stingy and difficult to access; its second pillar provides few public social services, and fewer still universally; and its network of third pillar measures is less developed, less rigorously enforced, and more directly and conspicuously shaped by powerful lobby groups and ‘dark money’ representing corporate interests. (Brady, 2009; Olsen, 2002, 2021) In the health policy domain, for example, the medical and health insurance industries have played a central role in thwarting any impulses for the development of a universal healthcare system like those of other wealthy capitalist nations with a stronger organized working-class. (e.g., Navarro, 1989; Olsen, 2002, 2011; Quadagno 2005) By spending millions of dollars lobbying the government, and making substantial contributions to political campaigns, the powerful multinational pharmaceutical companies (‘Big Pharma’) have profoundly shaped the regulatory landscape in the US – gaining approval from the FDA for drugs that have not been rigorously tested, repeatedly extending patents for ‘new’ drugs that are marginally different from earlier forms, and sustaining excessively high prices.
While the welfare states in all rich capitalist nations have undergone significant rollback over the past few decades of neoliberalism, this has been especially true in the United States.
The FDA approves new drugs significantly faster than regulatory agencies in Europe, Canada, and Japan but “unsafe drugs were prescribed more than one hundred million times in the United States before being recalled”. (Saluja et. al., 2016:523; Lenzer and Brownlee, 2025; Light et al., 2013) The regulation of food in the US is also generally less meticulous. Many ingredients and additives that are banned or must carry a health warning in the European Union, including certain food colouring, dyes and many chemicals used in cosmetics, skin and hair care products, have been approved by the FDA. The markedly quicker, but more risk-based, US regulatory framework is less proactive and transparent than the extensive pre-market and post-market assessment processes used by the EU (Geyman, 2018; Gøtzsche, 2013; Meller and Ahmed, 2019; Milman, 2019; Patients for Affordable Drugs, 2025). It includes a unique alternative option for approval – a pathway known as GRAS (‘generally recognized as safe’) – that puts greater responsibility on manufacturers to determine the safety of some additives and ingredients and renders them exempt from the FDA’s more stringent pre-market approval process.
The absence of a universal healthcare system in the United States leaves 26 million people without coverage. Inadequate attention to prevention of health problems, lax regulations, and higher inequality all contribute to poor American health outcomes in comparative health studies across wealthy countries. Americans experience lower life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates and higher rates of diseases and injuries. They are more likely to die from avoidable causes than residents in most other high-income nations despite higher levels of US healthcare spending. (Gunja et al., 2023; OECD, 2023, 2024; Wilkinson, 2005; Woolf and Aron, 2013) Yet the three pillars comprising the US welfare state have still played a central role in protecting Americans and promoting their well-being despite their deficiencies. Income programs, such as SNAP, TANF, Social Security Income (SSI), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSD) and Unemployment Insurance (UI) have significantly reduced poverty levels among low-income families and other vulnerable groups. Medicare (for people over 65 years of age and others with long-term disability) and Medicaid (for low-income people) provide healthcare for about 37 percent of the US population. Laws such as the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA) and Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have long safeguarded the rights of American workers. (e.g., Boone, 2015; Keith-Jennings et al., 2019; US Census Bureau, 2022) This is about to change.
Virtually every component of the US welfare state is being retrenched and reoriented now. While the welfare states in all rich capitalist nations have undergone significant rollback over the past few decades of neoliberalism, this has been especially true in the United States. The second Trump administration has magnified and fast-tracked this global trend with an unprecedented full-scale attack on the entire system of legal protections, regulatory agencies, and related research institutes that constitute its third pillar.
Undermining the Third Pillar in the US: A System Offensive
On January 20, 2025, day one of his second term, President Trump signed a barrage of impactful executive orders (EOs).1 EO 14158 Establishing and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) declared a retrenchment of the US state in the interests of corporate capital, in particular those of US Silicon Valley tech billionaires and fossil fuel executives. Not an official federal ‘department’ per se, which would require approval of an Act of Congress, the Trump administration indicated that DOGE would work from ‘outside’ the government “to drive large scale structural reform and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.’’ (Wen, 2024) Prepared well in advance, these EOs dismantling the frameworks of equity and equality in the welfare state clearly reflected the goals of conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation (set out in Project 2025) and Claremont Institute. In early 2025, DOGE was unleashed to attack the foundational pillars of US social policy.
DOGE’s short-lived leadership under tech billionaire Elon Musk was tasked with shrinking the size, scope, and expenditures of the administrative state apparatus to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse.” This alleged ‘public service’ focus concealed DOGE’s two core objectives. First, deep cuts to first and second pillar social programs proposed in Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ (now law) would help to finance an extension of the massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans introduced in the first Trump administration’s 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that were set to expire in 2025.2 The highly regressive combination of tax breaks for the rich and program cuts for the rest has been called the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history (Badger et al., 2025; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2025; Chait, 2025).3
While crucial to the health and well-being of Americans, it is the compliance barriers and financial costs that third pillar policies impose on corporations that are the primary targets for the Trump administration.
DOGE’s second objective has received less concentrated attention in the media: obliteration of the third pillar. Musk, who was long one of the most outspoken members of the corporate world calling for the creation of a precision weapon like DOGE to execute the ‘wholesale removal’ of federal regulations, was well-suited to lead this effort. (McLaughlin, 2025) The absurdity of Musk’s guiding principle, that ‘regulations should be default gone, not default there,’ is evident: regulations do not exist by ‘default,’ but in response to the demands of organized workers and social movements that were often forged in struggle against corporate indifference in the pursuit of profit.
The agencies DOGE targeted include central components of the Department of Health and Human Services, a body explicitly charged with “improving the health, safety and well-being of America,” such as the FDA and critical support and research institutes, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Other domestic targets included: the Department of Agriculture, responsible for research and education programs addressing nutrition; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), responsible for workplace safety; the Bureau of Consumer Protection (BCP), charged with preventing fraudulent and deceptive business practices; the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which enforces safety standards, conducts recalls, and educates consumers about product safety; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the nation’s premier institute for weather and climate science; and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which monitors the air, water and hazardous waste.4 While crucial to the health and well-being of Americans, it is the compliance barriers and financial costs that third pillar policies impose on corporations that are the primary targets for the Trump administration.
Central to hollowing out the third pillar is the dismissal of the regulatory agencies’ top officers; deputies, inspectors general, and career civil servants who previously maintained their positions when new governments assumed power. The third pillar evisceration has also included the en masse firing of thousands of employees, including innumerable scientists, academics and researchers at these agencies and institutes, which have also had their budgets slashed or frozen, and mandates realigned to further the Trump administration’s vision. The government has also identified hundreds of federal buildings, facilities and properties that it may sell off, and others whose leases may be terminated.
Despite Musk’s departure from DOGE only a few months after his appointment, his extensive overhaul of the central public regulatory agencies has been institutionalized. The US welfare state has been reformed to operate like a business, following the same format of change that Musk used when he took over the Twitter social media platform; eliminating programming and policies in the name of eliminating ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ is now part of the welfare state’s DNA.5
Conclusion: Revisiting State Theory
Slashing spending on social programs for poor and working families while delivering hefty tax breaks to the wealthy and undermining protective legislation is neither novel nor limited to incumbent Republican governments in the United States.6 It was the Democratic Clinton administration that cynically replaced the New Deal entitlement program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the less inclusive, less effective TANF program, to give people a “hand up, not a hand out.” Like the previous Trump administration, the current government is determined to revise, repeal, and replace existing grids of laws, statutes and regulations across policy domains, further incentivized by an irrational but resolute ambition to erase all traces of the policy legacies of former Democratic presidents Obama and Biden.7 (Brooking Institution, 2025; Eilperin and Cameron, 2017) Furthermore, it has harnessed another more intense and far-reaching strategy on an precedented scale, fomenting profound damage that will be considerably more difficult to undo than purely legislative changes: the dismantling of key US regulatory agencies and their related programs, services, and supports – the very foundation and infrastructure of the US welfare state’s third pillar.
It should come as no surprise that an unprecedented, all-out third pillar blitz would emerge in the US at this juncture, with a billionaire president flanked by an equally unprecedented number of billionaire cabinet secretaries, administrators, and ambassadors, as well as wealthy US legislative members. Trump’s supporters also include prolific tech and media CEOs, such as Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sundar Pichai (Google), Peter Thiel (Palantir Technologies) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon), as well as Vivek Ramaswamy (Strive Asset Management, Roivant Sciences), who played a critical role in the creation of DOGE.
Marxist theories of the state help in analysis of what has been going on in the US. ‘Instrumentalist’ state theorists have long argued for the close tracking of the social backgrounds of state elites and their close connections to powerful economic elites in order to understand why the ‘state in capitalist society’ largely serves them, highlighting their shared interests and worldviews. There is little need for such an investigation today when the key members of the US executive branch are concurrently the wealthiest billionaires and most powerful CEOs committed to unregulated capitalism and market-based social support. Focusing on power from below, power resources theorists (PRT) have repeatedly demonstrated that in nations with less organized labour and social movements, such as the US, welfare states are less developed and easier to retrench. ‘Structuralists’, in turn, argue that ‘capitalist states’ are structurally obliged to serve the long-term interests of capitalism. Whichever of the two US political parties is in power, the government will always be compelled to create the conditions for a profitable market economy, including the introduction of social supports and other economic policies that will sometimes contradict the immediate demands of some capitalists in order to overcome ongoing economic and social crises. But when the Executive positions and highest-level bureaucratic posts are directly held and dominated by the corporate elite, its immediate short-term concerns will supersede and undermine long-term interests – a development clearly well underway in the US. Taken together, these three theories help to explain the rapid dissolution of the third pillar in the US, providing an ominous warning for the rest of the world.8
Notes:
- Among the most emblematic and egregious of the 26 executive orders that Trump signed that day were EO 14151: Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs and Preferencing, EO 14164: Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety, and EO 14168: Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. ↩︎
- The cuts to SNAP (which supports 42 million people) and Medicaid (covering 70 million people and 41 percent of all US births) are the largest in US history. Other income programs identified for cuts include Supplemental Security Income benefits (SSI), Head Start, Housing Choice Vouchers, and Housing Assistance and Meals on Wheels. The changes to the Medicaid programs will lead to the closure of hundreds of rural hospitals across the US. ↩︎
- Social Security benefit levels and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) for people with disabilities) have not been directly targeted yet. But thousands of workers at the Social Security Agency (SSA) that administers them have been laid off and dozens of social security offices have already been closed, making it more difficult for the 69 million recipients to access their benefits. (Sainato 2025) ↩︎
- Embodying Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda, executive orders EO 14154: Unleashing American Energy and EO 14156: Declaring Energy a National Emergency undo long-standing science-based regulations on clear air, pollution and climate change endorsed by most of the world’s nations and shift the EPA’s mandate from protection to fossil fuels advocacy – a development enthusiastically celebrated by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as ‘the greatest day of deregulation our nation has ever seen’. (EPA 2025; Noor and Milman 2025) Similarly, Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of Health and Human Services is upending healthcare in the US terminating scientists and research grants addressing cancer, HIV and other life-saving research across several NIH agencies. A longstanding vaccine skeptic, he recently cancelled nearly 500 million dollars in mRNA vaccine research. While redirecting the development of vaccines and other medicines away from Big Pharma and the current business model and toward the not-for-profit production of global public goods that are available and accessible to everyone would be a positive first step, simply cancelling research grants and ongoing projects will expose everyone to much greater risk. (Moon et al., 2022; Sullivan 2025; Tyler 2025)
↩︎ - Musk’s highly publicized rift with Trump reflects some of the central differences among the key groups supporting the Trump regime. For example, while Trump’s dominant multinational corporate capitalist backers are happy to exploit workers in their factories abroad and low-paid migrant workers within the US, a large portion of his political base has called to bring industry home and keep immigrants out. (Foster, 2025) ↩︎
- Similar, if less extreme developments have occurred in most other nations, including some with social democratic and labour governments in power. (Clayton and Pontusson, 1998; Olsen, 2002, 2013) ↩︎
- The Brookings Institution provides a useful online tracker that follows significant ongoing changes to the regulatory legal frameworks in the US (The Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets Regulatory Tracker). Available: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-regulatory-changes-in-the-second-trump-administration/ ↩︎
- For overviews of these three theoretical traditions (among others) see: Barrow 1993, Carnoy 1984 and Olsen 2002. ↩︎
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