One hundred days into the second Trump administration, young people have experienced a brutal onslaught of policy violence. Indigenous youth followed by ICE. Layoffs. Delayed financial aid. Late payments. Increased gender-based harassment. Suppression of free speech. These are just a few of the consequences experienced by young people across the country in the last 100 days.
We should not be surprised; young people fared poorly during the first Trump administration. During the best year of the first Trump term (2019), nearly 1 in 7 young people were living in poverty and the youth unemployment rate was more than twice the national average. As more young people reported serious psychological distress and a need for mental health support, uninsured rates for young adults increased. Students in schools were increasingly referred to law enforcement and arrested. And this was before the pandemic hit, exacerbating these longstanding challenges.
This time, nearly all of these harmful actions were laid out in Project 2025. Remember when Trump claimed that he knew nothing about Project 2025 or its content? That’s laughable, as the speed and success of its implementation have shocked and thrilled its architects.
In the first week of the new administration, we saw executive orders on immigration, limitations on reproductive health care, threats to LGBTQ rights, climate, and race. The pace has remained frenetic, with additional executive orders aimed at dismantling the Department of Education, now rescinded memoranda freezing federal grants, threats to university funding, and foreign born students with legal status detained without due process. Nearly all of these actions are illegal, and are in various stages of court challenges. The pace of these actions, however, has knocked many sectors off balance and created a climate of fear and overwhelm that has yielded a disappointing response from many of our most powerful institutions.
We can predict what’s still to come. Project 2025’s labor plan prioritizes work at the expense of education. Anything that would make higher education accessible to anyone but the most wealthy and privileged is to be eliminated. On the workforce side, it means giving $10,000 per year per employee to employers to hire people needing jobs—but taking that money from higher education funding. It means updating regulations to allow teenagers to work in dangerous jobs—a cynical play to backfill jobs currently worked by immigrants with child labor that is currently being tested in Florida.
In the plans for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), efforts to impose work requirements on access to health care, income support, and food programs are central. This despite definitive evidence that most people who need these supports and can work, do work. Work requirements act as a bureaucratic barrier that cuts benefits for people who are eligible, but did not submit the requisite paperwork. Young people are particularly vulnerable to navigating burdensome paperwork requirements. They also already have the highest uninsured rate of any age group.
Under a second Trump administration, young people have been or will be relegated to unaffordable college education, low quality jobs, and inaccessible health care and support for basic needs. Given that young voters from both parties identified inflation, the cost of living, and jobs that pay a living wage as priorities, these results are devastating. In fact, when taken with the funding cuts impacting nonprofits and services that have already rolled out, and tariffs that have roiled the economy, I can’t really think of a more aggressive way to tell young people that their country doesn’t care about them. Perhaps this is why recent polling has shown that upwards of two thirds of Gen Z disapprove of the Trump administration.
For policymakers, advocates, and leaders who do care about young people, now is the time to show it. Congress should reintroduce the bipartisan WIOA reauthorization that was negotiated last congress (A Stronger Workforce for America Act)—especially the Youth Title. Reauthorizing this version of the bill would provide a strong signal that young people’s economic concerns have been heard—and reduce the risk that the legislation will not be funded because it is not authorized (another Project 2025 theme). Congress must also preserve young people’s access to Medicaid, a critical lifeline for a group that already has the highest uninsured rate of any age group. State and local policy makers must both leverage their influence to push Congress to act in the interest of their state budgets, and prepare contingency plans.
We are now faced with a choice as a nation; to protect the all too limited investments that we make in young people in this country, or to obliterate them. Our young people have watched 100 days that have careened toward obliteration. We can’t afford to wait another 100 days to turn the tide.
Dr. Nia West-Bey is the executive director at the National Collaborative for Transformative Youth Policy. She is a community psychologist with nearly 30 years of youth work, specializing in youth development, policy analysis, and the intersection of psychology, advocacy, and public policy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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