In America’s new budget, your worth isn’t measured in rights—it’s measured in revenue.

This budget isn’t just a spreadsheet—it’s a declaration of who matters, and who can be discarded.

There is a billionaire’s worldview embedded in the House budget, and it’s no longer subtle. It defines human worth in terms of labor, and labor in terms of profitability. From this perspective, people matter only insofar as they contribute economically to someone else’s bottom line. Raising children, caring for elders, healing, learning, aging—none of these activities register as value. If it’s not producing revenue, it doesn’t count.

This logic doesn’t just live in boardrooms—it’s been codified into policy. The House budget bill is more than a financial document; it is a cultural project. It redesigns the role of government not as steward or safety net, but as a sorting mechanism. If you’re rich, you get permanent tax cuts and deregulation. If you’re poor, you get suspicion, surveillance, and work requirements. If you’re vulnerable, you’re a liability to be managed, not a neighbor to be supported.

It offers corporations regulatory rollbacks and the military-industrial complex a blank check. But for ordinary Americans? It tightens Medicaid eligibility, shifts SNAP costs to already-strained states, and cuts healthcare access for millions. It doesn’t invest in people—it punishes them for needing care. It doesn’t reduce government—it repurposes it: from builder to gatekeeper, from provider to punisher.

Even the so-called “MAGA baby bonds”—$1,000 deposited in savings accounts for newborns—are more branding exercise than economic policy. They are symbolic offerings in a budget that otherwise undermines the very conditions that give children a future—affordable healthcare, quality education, food security, and clean environments.

From an anthropological standpoint, this budget represents a profound shift in what scholars call the moral economy—the system of shared expectations about what a society owes its members and how value is recognized. The postwar consensus, however imperfect, held that the state had a role to play in ensuring dignity: through Social Security, public education, Medicare, and infrastructure. This budget rejects that legacy. In its place, it installs the cold arithmetic of market logic and moral judgment.

Under this new framework, need becomes evidence of personal failure. Poverty becomes a crime. Dependency—especially on public support—is treated not as a social fact but as a character flaw. Public goods are reframed as private burdens. Solidarity is recast as waste.

This is the ideological backbone of Project 2025, and the budget carries it forward. It’s not merely a matter of fiscal policy—it’s a blueprint for transforming the role of government in American life. It proposes that citizenship itself be redefined—not as a shared status of belonging, but as a conditional category based on economic output. You are not guaranteed rights and protections because you live here or contribute to your community—you must prove your worth in the labor market.

The deeper danger is that this worldview doesn’t just devalue people—it erodes democracy itself. A government that abandons care is not neutral; it’s actively choosing which lives to protect and which to expose. The move from social contract to market contract is not a technical adjustment—it’s a rupture. And like all ruptures, it redraws the lines of inclusion and exclusion.

We’ve seen these dynamics before. In colonial economies. In industrial labor regimes. In every system where elites use scarcity as a weapon to keep power consolidated at the top. What’s different now is the scope—and the speed. This budget isn’t a compromise. It’s a manifesto.

And so the question is not just what programs are being cut or funded. The question is: What kind of society is being built in their place?

Budgets are not just financial plans. They are moral statements. They tell us who is seen and who is ignored, who is worthy and who is burdensome, who gets protected and who gets left behind. This one speaks clearly—and harshly.

If we want a different future, we’ll need a different foundation. One that values care as much as capital, interdependence as much as independence, and dignity beyond the wage. That kind of society won’t emerge on its own. It will have to be fought for—by those who still believe that people matter more than profit.

Suggested Readings

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Ferguson, James. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New York: Picador, 2008.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Wolf, Eric R. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.