A few months ago, it seemed obvious that the biggest story of Donald Trump’s second term as president was Elon Musk becoming his co-pilot, steering what was often called the DOGE blitzkrieg. Last week — yes, it was just last week — it was tempting to see the biggest story as the end of that partnership, with Musk’s initiative yielding trivial budget savings and significant legal challenges and then ultimately a messily personal (if perhaps temporary) political divorce.
That it was all such good theater meant that it was possible to miss — below claims about “the Epstein files” and innuendo about drug-fueled psychosis and arguments over who was most responsible for the 2024 victory — some actual, substantive beef. That is, Trump’s big policy bill — the only major piece of legislation the Republican Congress has even tried to advance, in its first six months, probably its best chance at a major policy achievement before next year’s midterms and a road map for the near American future that deserves considerably more public scrutiny than it’s gotten to this point.
At a topline glance, the bill is an outrage: large tax cuts for the rich and millions kicked off health insurance, almost a parody of what an apparently fragile coalition of contemporary conservatives might abide (if also a bill that raised the eyebrows of a few debt scolds, including Musk). But because it is also a one-stop legislative omnibus, rushed so quickly through the House that Republican representatives are now protesting they didn’t even know what was in it, there is also an awful lot buried beneath those top-lines worth scrutinizing. Today, I want to highlight three particular priorities, each distinct in its destructive cruelty but together pointing toward something a bit more systematic — a hostility toward collective investment in the common good and our shared future.
The “green dream” was fun while it lasted
The first is on clean energy, where the bill looks like not just a repeal of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act but an indictment of the theory of politics that gave rise to it. As Tim Sahay of the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab recently put it, the political project of that climate act was built on two principles. First, “deliverism” — that in the Obama years policy wonks had erred in not highlighting the value of legislation to voters, and that making a green-industrial boom very visible would also make it very popular. Second, and related, was the principle of political “lock-in,” that showering green money on purple and even red districts would mean that Republicans would, by and large, abandon their opposition and embrace clean-energy pork.
Perhaps faster rollout, and more immediate permitting reform, might have helped vindicate those principles and protect hundreds of billions in clean-energy tax credits. But the apparent demise of the I.R.A. looks like a case study in post-material politics, the thermostatic law of public opinion and the principle that whenever the G.O.P. has to choose between anything at all and tax cuts — in this case, tax credits for the green transition and tax cuts that could be partly paid for through their repeal — it’s never really a choice at all. Republican support for more solar power has fallen to 61 percent today from 84 percent in 2020, according to Pew. Back then, nearly two-thirds of Republicans wanted to prioritize renewable buildout. Today, it’s fallen to one-third.
A new immigration police state
The second is on immigration, where the policy bill promises to allocate $155 billion in funding for border control — five times the amount allocated to the border overall in 2025, even though cross-border flows have recently fallen by more than 90 percent since surging in 2023. Since Inauguration Day, Trump’s border policy has been horrifying and brutal, and over the weekend in Los Angeles, the raids looked like provocations designed to produce a pretext for further crackdowns — by the National Guard and potentially U.S. Marines. But although the images are appalling, the numbers have not been especially large — particularly compared to promises from Trump on the campaign trail to deport tens of millions if elected. Boosting border security spending by more than a hundred billion as illegal border crossings collapse is one big logistical step toward actually pursuing that goal at scale, rather than just performing I.C.E. cruelty as a kind of political consolation prize.
Force-feeding school choice
And a third plank of the bill is, if not the most eye-catching, nevertheless telling — the commitment to establishing school voucher programs across all 50 states.
You may think that school vouchers reflect the basic ideological drift of the country, but for more than half a century, every single time they are put to a democratic test, the public roundly rejects them. In 2024, such initiatives were defeated in three states — Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska — two of which also went for Trump by huge margins. This pattern is not a new one. Since 1967 — 1967! — no single state referendum in favor of school vouchers has passed anywhere in the country. And yet, in the past few decades, 33 states and the District of Columbia have all enacted voucher programs, and just in the five years since 2019 the number of American students using vouchers has doubled.
This is not just a bad procedural look but a genuine democratic stain, made all the worse because the record of voucher programs is so abysmally bad, as Michigan State’s Josh Cowen documented last year in his cleareyed book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
How bad? In Louisiana and Ohio, voucher programs were shown to have been worse for student performance, measured by testing, than the Covid-19 pandemic, which shuttered American schools for many months and produced such widespread outrage that those closings now represent for many Americans the largest social scar produced by the pandemic. Taking advantage of a voucher program in Louisiana, the research suggests, was much worse for your child than that. In Ohio, the effect on test scores was almost twice as bad.
This is not the kind of record that anyone should want to expand, and older programs have produced only somewhat less terrible results. So what explains the zombie persistence of the voucher movement? Almost surely, these programs could be designed better, but it is close to impossible to take in the recent track record and continue to believe that voucher initiatives are good-faith efforts by well-meaning reformers. Much more intuitive is to see them as an ideological effort to divert students out of the public school systems as part of an effort to undermine those systems and what they represent — almost no matter the educational consequences. Especially in the age of MAGA 2.0, DOGE and the big policy bill, vouchers look less like an earnest effort at school reform than like one part of a broader crusade, which continues after Musk — the war on the entire idea of public goods.
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