The Trump administration wants to spend $45 billion to build an inhumane deportation industry while planning to cut at least $40 billion in life-saving programs from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The juxtaposition is a near-perfect gauge of how heartless our government has become in the richest nation on Earth.
For deportation, the administration virtually froths for an Amazon-like fulfillment center to robotically sort out handcuffed humans and shuffle them down the aisles onto trucks and planes.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), recently told private security companies seeking contracts that ICE needs to be “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours…trying to figure out how to do that with human beings and trying to get them pretty much all over the globe is really something for us.”
That is really something, on many levels. One is the sheer immorality of reducing humans to shrink-wrapped products to shove onto conveyor belts and stack on forklifts. Another is that so far, ICE is as indiscriminate and incompetent as Amazon is efficient. President Trump promised “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” Border czar Tom Homan said the United States government was “targeting the worst of the worst” for deportation.
Instead, there have been notorious incidents of students being rounded up for exercising their right to free speech and deportations of untold numbers of people without US criminal records. One recent notorious case is that of 238 mostly Venezuelan migrants deported to prisons in El Salvador; Bloomberg News found that only about 10% of them had a criminal record in the United States. The legality of many deportations is highly questionable, as the White House has defied court orders to turn back deportation planes and return wrongly deported people back to the United States
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, founded at Syracuse University, ICE issued 18,000 “detainer” requests for local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to hold people for possible deportation in the first month of the new Trump administration. That was more than triple the detainers issued in the first full month of the Biden administration, which faced its own fierce criticism from immigration rights advocates.
ICE says detainers are mostly for people who have been convicted of burglaries and robberies, kidnapping, homicide, sexual assault, weapons offenses, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. But only 28% of people targeted by a detainer in the first month of the new Trump administration had a prior conviction in the United States, with the most frequent offenses involving drunk driving and other traffic violations.
As for the “worst of the worst,” just one half of one percent of detainers involved a convicted rapist or murderer. So far, all that the government is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process to separate children from parents and deport US citizen children, including one with late-stage cancer.
That the nation would spend $45 billion on this malicious ruination of lives and destruction of families looks even more unconscionable when President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. want to cut $40 billion from a department that says its mission is to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.”
A review of the proposed cuts—as detailed in a 64-page memorandum that was leaked to the media—shows how profoundly the Trump administration is about to betray that mission.
Cuts despite deadly toll
The administration would end the HIV Epidemic Initiative, even though nearly 5,000 people a year in the United States still die with HIV/AIDS as the underlying cause. Despite many advances in HIV treatment that allow patients longer lives, there were still 38,000 HIV diagnoses in 2022, half of them in southern states. While one in five people in the United States with HIV are still not able to access treatment.
The administration would kill the Minority AIDS Initiative, even though the disease is rife with gross racial disparities. Though African Americans are 12% of the nation’s population, they accounted for 37% of new HIV diagnoses in 2022.
The cuts would eliminate the division of Firearm Injury and Mortality Research. In doing so, the administration is imposing an ignorance that will likely further paralyze any debate on gun control, since the division’s mission is to provide data “to inform action” on a major cause of death in the United States. Last year, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence an “urgent public health crisis,” as gun deaths soared to a record 48,830 in 2021.
New research funded by HHS’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that emergency rooms were receiving a gunshot victim every 30 minutes in nine southern and western states and the District of Columbia. Even though murders have subsided somewhat from a record 21,000 in 2021 during the COVID crisis, gun suicides kept rising to a record 27,300 in 2023.
Yet, HHS has scrubbed Murthy’s advisory from its website.
The Youth Violence Division would also be eliminated, even though gun deaths are the leading cause of death for youth under 18, killing 2,500 kids a year. Due to the Trump administration’s demands to end equity across all public policy, HHS proposes to eliminate the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. More than half of Black youth who die before the age of 18 are victims of gun violence, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Black youth are six times more likely to die a gun death than White youth.
Besides the 27,300 gun suicides in 2023, another 22,000 suicides occurred that year from other methods, primarily suffocation and intentional poisoning. About another 100,000 people died in 2022 from unintentional overdoses of fentanyl, methamphetamine, prescription opioids, cocaine, heroin, and other substances.Yet, despite the approximately 150,000 combined deaths a year from suicides and overdoses, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy propose to eliminate dozens of mental health and substance abuse training and treatment programs for children, families, people of color, people in the criminal justice system, first responders, community recovery support, and crisis response.
As if the Flint Water Crisis never happened, HHS under the Trump administration would end the Childhood Lead Poisoning Program and the Lead Exposure Registry. That is despite a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal that showed half of the US population was exposed to high levels of lead in early childhood, and a 2016 Reuters analysis that 3,000 communities across the nation had higher lead levels than Flint. A 2022 study found that without stronger congressional action to protect children from the brain damage of lead exposure, the nation will “needlessly absorb” about $80 billion in annual costs to the nation’s economy, double the proposed cuts to HHS.
HHS would end the direct involvement of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in routine inspections of food facilities, trusting an uneven patchwork of state vigilance on bacteria, parasites, and viruses in our food systems. Never mind that the CDC says there are 48 million cases of foodborne illness every year, costing 3,000 lives and requiring 128,000 hospitalizations. A study last year done by researchers from US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Colorado School of Public Health found that food illnesses cost the nation $75 billion a year in medical care, lost productivity, premature deaths, and ongoing chronic illnesses.
Yet, HHS wants to cut $40 billion from the budget.
Cuts range from chronic diseases to drowning programs
The Trump administration and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, have disingenuously stated that funding and eliminations of departments are targeting waste and fraud. One need not be a math major to see that what they propose is the opposite.
For instance, the cuts would eliminate the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, even though cancer, heart disease, and stroke kill more than 1.5 million people a year in the United States, and cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars a year in health care costs and lost productivity. Many of those diseases, along with diabetes and obesity, are often preventable, and the national center has been a resource for programs to reduce smoking, promote physical activity, lower alcohol intake, and improve nutrition.
The administration wants to eliminate the National Institutes for Nursing Research and several other nursing programs. This is in the face of studies that show that lower nurse-to-patient ratios and lower patient waiting times (because of more nurses) can save a hospital a couple of million dollars a year. It is also in the face of a 2021 study that found that in New York state alone, lower nurse-to-patient ratios could save more than 4,000 lives and more than $700 million over a two-year period.
The administration is so heartless that it even wants to eliminate its program for drowning, even though 4,500 people a year perish underwater, even though it is the top cause of death for preschoolers, and even though 55% of US adults have never taken a swim lesson.
All this raises real questions of how people in this nation could needlessly die if the HHS cuts become real in the areas of gun safety, mental health, food safety, HIV, or nursing. It should be unfathomable that the nation would let its guard down after Flint, risking stunted brain development in untold children.
For these $40 billion-worth of cuts to come at the same time our government wants to spend $45 billion to become Amazon-efficient at shipping human beings “all over the globe” to foreign prisons is establishing this nation as a beacon of cruelty in the developed world. The government wants a conveyor belt of deportation as it dismantles health systems in the name of efficiency.
That would be quite the fulfillment center. Immigrants are forklifted into misery. The rest of us are being carted into a cavalier world by a government that clearly does not care how many people die.