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The GOP Is Taking Our Healthcare to Fund Bombs and Tax Cuts; We’re Fighting Back
Republicans have decided that they don’t care about what the American people want, only about enabling Trump’s worst impulses. Our job is to make sure they regret that this November.
Apr 03, 2026
Last year, Republicans cut $1 trillion from Medicaid in the same bill that gave billionaires massive tax cuts. They also slashed funding for the Affordable Care Act, making healthcare unaffordable for Americans across the country.
As a result of these cuts, at least 1.5 million Americans have already lost their healthcare coverage, with an estimated 15 million set to lose coverage in the coming years. Nearly 450 hospitals, many of them in rural areas, are at risk of closing or shrinking.
Despite this devastation, Republicans are planning to make even deeper cuts to healthcare. Top Republicans, including House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), want to make even more cuts to the Affordable Care Act—to fund President Donald Trump’s catastrophic war with Iran. Trump himself is threatening cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, saying, “We’re fighting wars… It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”
Republicans have decided that they don’t care about what the American people want, only about enabling Trump’s worst impulses. Our job is to make sure they regret that this November, when every member of the US House and one-third of the US Senate is on the ballot.
The Trump regime and their Republican minions in Congress think they can ignore the people, but when we stand together, when we raise our voices together, we cannot be ignored.
That’s why we are launching the Stop Taking Our Health Care Campaign to hold Republicans accountable. This month, members of Congress are home for recess—and we’ll make sure that they hear from their constituents.
We are holding dozens of events in targeted congressional districts across the country, demanding that Republicans Stop Taking Our Health Care. But, we need your help to host even more. Take a look and see if there is an event near you. If there isn’t one, then please sign up to host one yourself. We will help make it a success.
To kick off the Stop Taking Our Health Care Campaign, we held a live stream with guests including Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas).
Rep. Underwood said: “Donald Trump and Republicans’ failure to address these tax credits has created a healthcare crisis for working families. When premiums go up and help disappears, families are forced to make impossible choices. Do they keep their health insurance, or do they pay their rent? Do they refill their prescriptions, or do they buy groceries?”
Every day, the Trump administration is spending at least a billion dollars of taxpayer money in Iran.The American people do not want this war. They want affordable healthcare. - @underwood.house.gov @unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 12:01 PM
Rep. Casar said: “They’ve already gutted Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, kicking 15 million Americans potentially off of their healthcare. And now they want to kick off hundreds of thousands more everyday working families from their healthcare to pay for Trump’s completely unnecessary war of choice in Iran. We’ve got to put everyday Americans’ lives above more and more profits for the Trump administration and their rich friends.”
The Trump Administration already gutted Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.Now they want to kick off hundreds of thousands more working families from their healthcare to pay for Trump's completely unnecessary war in Iran. - @repcasar.bsky.social @unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 12:05 PM
Theresa Luoni, a New Jersey mom and caregiver whose family relies on Medicaid, said: “Republicans in Washington have worked day and night to raise costs for families like mine and make it harder for us to make ends meet, and now they're doubling down, threatening even deeper cuts to Medicaid so they can pay for their war and continue handing out tax breaks to billionaires.”
Republicans in Washington have worked day and night to raise costs for families like mine.Now they're doubling down, threatening even deeper cuts to Medicaid, so they can pay for their war and continue handing out tax breaks to billionaires. - Theresa Luoni@unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 12:19 PM
Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, senior adviser at Social Security Works, said: “Our campaign and this month of action is designed to hold these people accountable for their vote on things like the Big Ugly Bill, which failed to extend the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act and cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. Our message is simple: Stop taking our healthcare.”
During this month of action, we will hold Republicans accountable for the Big Ugly Bill.Rural hospitals and nursing homes are already closing because of them. - @jonbowzerbauman.bsky.social @unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 12:17 PM
Unrig Our Economy Campaign Director Leor Tal said: “Republicans in Congress promised to lower costs, but instead, they cut our healthcare and made life even more expensive for working families. Now Republicans in Congress want to cut healthcare even more to pay for this unnecessary and expensive war that they've started, which is already driving up costs for working families. That's why we’re launching Stop Taking Our Health Care, a nationwide campaign fighting back against Republican efforts to rip healthcare coverage away from working families.”
Republicans in Congress promised to lower costs. Instead they cut our healthcare and made life even more expensive for working families. And now they want to cut health care even more to pay for this unnecessary and expensive war.- Leor Tal, @unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 11:55 AM
The Trump regime and their Republican minions in Congress think they can ignore the people, but when we stand together, when we raise our voices together, we cannot be ignored. It’s time to demand healthcare not warfare!
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‘A System Rigged’: Untaxed Wealth of Richest 0.1% Is More Than Assets of World’s Poorest Half
A decade after the Panama Papers, the global rich are still hiding more than $2.8 trillion in tax havens. Just a fraction of that money could end extreme hunger and provide clean water to everyone on Earth.
Apr 02, 2026
The richest 0.1% of people on Earth are hiding more than $2.8 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. That money alone is more wealth than is owned by the entire bottom half of humanity, more than 4.1 billion people.
These findings were published in a report released Thursday by Oxfam International on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 Panama Papers, which provided an unprecedented look at how the world's most powerful capitalists, financiers, political leaders, celebrities, and criminals exploited offshore tax havens to stash their money.
"Ten years on, the superrich are still sequestering oceans of wealth in offshore vaults,” said Christian Hallum, Oxfam International’s tax lead.
The percentage of untaxed wealth in offshore accounts has dropped in the past 10 years, in large part due to global reforms like the adoption of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Automatic Exchange of Information framework (AEOI), which allows revenue authorities around the world to easily share information and crack down on cheats.
However, many nations in the Global South are excluded from this system, even though they need the tax revenue the most.
Oxfam found that a staggering $3.5 trillion, more than 3.2% of the global gross domestic product, still remains in untaxed accounts. That's more than the entire GDP of France and is more than twice the combined wealth of the world's 44 poorest nations.
And while the percentage of untaxed wealth is shrinking, that doesn't mean inequality has shrunk.
On the contrary, the December 2025 "World Inequality Report" found that the richest 0.001% of humanity—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires and billionaires—now have three times as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population combined.
Inequality has surged around the world in part due to taxation policies and pandemic recovery packages that overwhelmingly favor the rich. The most glaring was adopted in the world's financial hub, the United States, last year.
The megabudget passed by Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump handed a $1 trillion tax cut to America's wealthiest 1% while slashing more than $1 trillion in spending from Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs. It has been described by some economists as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history.
While the global top 0.1% holds about 80% of untaxed offshore wealth, an even smaller group of uber-wealthy individuals does most of the cheating. The world's richest 0.01%, who hold at least $50 million apiece, control about half of all money in global tax shelters—$1.7 trillion.
According to the Tax Justice Network's Corporate Tax Haven Index, Caribbean islands under UK ownership, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, are among the worst offenders. Other notable tax havens include Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
A February Oxfam report on Elon Musk, who is well on his way to becoming the world's first trillionaire, found that his company, Tesla—which managed to pay zero dollars on its $2.3 billion income in 2024—has not published a country-by-country report on its taxes and that it has subsidiaries in many countries considered to be tax havens.
Big Pharma companies, including AbbVie and Merck, also used tax shelters to lower their total tax expense in 2025 by more than $1 billion, according to a report released earlier this month by the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition.
"This isn’t just about clever accounting—it’s about power and impunity," Hallum said. "When millionaires and billionaires stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens, they place themselves above the obligations that bind the rest of society."
"The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating," he continued. "We see our public hospitals and schools starved of funds, our social fabric shredded by rising inequality, and ordinary people forced to shoulder the costs of a system rigged to enrich a tiny few.”
Even a fraction of the money currently stashed away by the world's wealthiest could alleviate untold amounts of suffering.
In November, the United Nations' World Food Program estimated that extreme hunger, which currently affects more than 318 million people around the world, could be eradicated by 2030 with investments of about $93 billion per year, but that global hunger programs instead remain “slow, fragmented, and underfunded."
According to a 2021 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, investments of around $114 billion per year would similarly be enough to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Oxfam called on governments around the world to increase coordination to prevent the wealthy from hiding their riches from tax authorities. It also urged them to adopt more aggressive policies to tax the 1%'s wealth at home, including taxes on income and on extreme wealth.
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Trump's Great Talent: Breaking Many Things at Once
Let’s call what the Trump administration is doing “multitrashing”: destroying things on multiple fronts, like a bull in a shopping mall full of fragile wares.
Mar 27, 2026
Maybe you’re reading this article while listening to a podcast. Or you’re participating in a dull Zoom meeting. Or you’re talking on the phone with a relative.
Maybe you’ve just read the first three lines of this article three times without really registering them because your attention is absorbed elsewhere.
You’re not alone.
The modern age, with its multiple demands on a person’s time, seems to require multitasking. It’s not the kind of activity you read about in the classics. Surely that fellow who ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC didn’t carry along a couple papyrus scrolls to read along the way. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t paint Mona Lisa’s smile, stop to conduct a scientific experiment on gravity, and simultaneously jot down his thoughts on anatomy, going back and forth among those activities like a whirling dervish.
Trump has been released in the FAO Schwarz of military toy stores, and he wants to use all the gadgets. This time around, the generals aren’t holding him in check.
Though it promises greater productivity, multitasking is not a wondrous invention. Shifting between tasks, according to a number of psychological studies, actually reduces productivity and generates more errors. The result can be banal, as in, “I’m sorry, could you repeat what you just said to me?” Or it can be fatal, as in the thousands of deaths caused by drivers looking at their phones.
It’s hard to imagine President Donald Trump multitasking, unless you count sleeping during cabinet meetings, lying and walking at the same time, or eating Whoppers while dispersing them on social media. And yet, his administration has been extremely effective its first year doing multiple things at the same time, if you define “effective” in terms of lives lost, reputations ruined, and institutions destroyed.
Don’t mistake all this destruction for multitasking. The effort to keep all the spinning plates aloft is something pursued, however spuriously, in the service of greater productivity. Instead, let’s call what the Trump administration is doing “multitrashing.” Imagine a bully that pushes the magician out of the way so that all the plates come crashing to the ground. Now multiply that a thousand-fold. Trump and his cohort are busy destroying things on multiple fronts, like a bull in a shopping mall full of fragile wares.
Just look at what the Trump team has done to the federal government: programs gutted, agencies disbanded, regulatory frameworks diluted to the point of disappearance. Just look at the destruction of science funding, the rollback of civil rights, the wrenching apart of immigrant families. Trump has approached domestic policy as if it were an axis of resistance—Bureaucrats, Academics, the Woke, and the Undocumented—that requires a multifront war of assault and attrition.
Let’s face it: The frog of America is not in a pot of water coming to a slow boil. The frog of America is in the middle of a pile of rapidly accumulating rubble. What the poor frog can’t perceive is how high and how wide this pile of rubble actually stretches. The frog thinks: Maybe it’s not a lot of damage and I can soon jump my way clear. Poor, deluded frog.
If multitrashing has been so egregiously successful at home, it pales in comparison with Trump’s actions in the international arena. The trash-talking and trash-acting president has discovered, in his second term, that the US military arsenal is not just for deterrent purposes. Trump has been released in the FAO Schwarz of military toy stores, and he wants to use all the gadgets. This time around, the generals aren’t holding him in check.
The itinerary of destruction so far this term has involved the US military in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, along with two excursions to Iran. It’s been only a year, but what a long, strange, vindictive trip it’s been.
The Iran War
The Iranian government still stands. This is remarkable given the sheer amount of money and firepower the United States and Israel have devoted to toppling it. If Trump had focused on one task, rather than being engaged in multitrashing, he might have at least avoided some of the worst consequences of this war. Convinced of an easy victory, he did nothing to shockproof the US economy by, for instance, arranging for naval escorts in the Strait of Hormuz.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, for all his similar hubris, nevertheless prepared the Russian economy for the expected sanctions after his full-scaled invasion of Ukraine. Trump, by contrast, is the Alfred E. Neuman of presidents: “What, me worry?”
Other presidents have been vengeful, violent, imperialist. But their destructive campaigns were usually in the serve of constructing something.
Iran, meanwhile, is focused on one thing: regime survival. It has caused destruction in turn, in multiple locations, but this has all served the purpose of increasing the pain for Israel and the United States. Closing down the Strait of Hormuz, bombing energy infrastructure throughout the Gulf, selecting hardliners to lead the new government: Iran wants not just to force a ceasefire but to win concessions such as a reduction in sanctions.
Trump, frustrated by a conflict that exceeds his attention span, has moved onto other tasks, like assisting drug operations in Ecuador, threatening NATO countries, and pursuing regime change in Cuba. There is method in his madness. All of this furious activity keeps Trump in the news cycle and in the hearts of his supporters. It keeps Congress out of the loop and adversaries (as well as putative friends) guessing.
Most importantly, it keeps potential successes rather than obvious ongoing failures in the public eye.
The Ultimate End
Other presidents have been vengeful, violent, imperialist. But their destructive campaigns were usually in the serve of constructing something. George W. Bush imagined a new democratic order in the Middle East. Richard Nixon dreamed of an anti-communist bloc in Southeast Asia. Most presidents from Teddy Roosevelt on have attempted to position the United States as the world’s policeman atop a rules-based order that disproportionately benefits America.
In a recent New Yorker piece, Daniel Immerwahr notes that Trump has “liberated himself from the burdens of empire.” Ironically, horribly, this disburdening has freed the president to destroy at will.
Indeed, it seems that Trump is multitrashing for the sheer malicious joy of it. He didn’t build something new in Venezuela, simply destroyed his rival. He is planning something comparable for Cuba. As for Iran, he is not even sure what constitutes victory, other than a display of epic fury.
Multitrashing is the opposite of bureaucracy. It destroys without a thought to order, efficiency, results, consequences. Only the strong can survive the harrowing process of such destruction.
As in his domestic campaigns, Trump is up against what he imagines to be a global axis of resistance: the United Nations, all Europeans to the left of Nigel Farage, any rival autocrat who refuses to bend a knee. The international order is the creation of his hated liberals, so it too must go. He has absolutely no idea of what to replace the rules-based system with other than, perhaps, a reality TV show in which countries must submit to humiliating tasks while a single judge, Trump, decides who rises and who falls.
It is the nature of bureaucracy to break a task down to its smallest components, like a Ford assembly line, in order to produce things more efficiently. It is, in theory, a process of focus. In practice, as anyone who has had to deal with the Department of Motor Vehicles knows, bureaucracy is diffuse and unfocused. But again, in its way, bureaucracy has been created to keep a modern society functioning. It is the skeleton of order that keeps everything in place.
Multitrashing is the opposite of bureaucracy. It destroys without a thought to order, efficiency, results, consequences. Only the strong can survive the harrowing process of such destruction. Billionaires thrive in Trump’s America; superpowers dominate in TrumpWorld. Meanwhile, in a rage room of his own devising, Trump continues to flit from one activity to another, using a sledgehammer to destroy computers, a chain saw to cut through furniture, a howitzer to blow up heavy machinery.
It is theater of a sort, and Trump delights in performing on the world stage. But it’s not kabuki. It’s a visceral one-man show that reveals the sickening highs and lows of this new theater of cruelty.
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