Necrostate: How Trump’s Agenda Turns Governance into a Tool of Abandonment

From Safety Net to Snare: How Trump’s Agenda Weaponizes the State Against the Vulnerable

There was a time when death was treated as failure—of medicine, of infrastructure, of policy. Increasing mortality rates were a warning sign, a call to repair the social contract. But we are now entering a political era where death is not a failure of the system—it is the system working as intended. The emerging necrostate, as embodied in Trump’s second-term agenda and the 2025 Project, doesn’t merely tolerate early death, preventable disease, or institutional collapse. It organizes and accelerates them.

This is a politics that no longer seeks to manage life, but to manage decay. It doesn’t merely withdraw care—it replaces it with exposure. Not everyone is targeted equally. But for millions, life is now a slow attrition—death by untreated illness, poisoned air, broken systems, and withheld aid. This is governance through abandonment. And it is being repackaged as fiscal responsibility.

Start with life expectancy. For the first time in modern U.S. history, it declined for three consecutive years before the pandemic, then plummeted again during it. While 2023 showed a modest rebound, the decline remains sharpest among Native, Black, and low-income Americans. This isn’t a temporary dip—it’s the statistical residue of structural abandonment: gutted health systems, shuttered clinics, poisoned water, and policy decisions that knowingly consign millions to worse outcomes.

And the consequences are not only moral—they are economic. Just a half-year drop in U.S. life expectancy translates to an estimated $11.6 trillion in lost productivity. A full-year drop means $23.3 trillion—comparable in scale to the total U.S. GDP lost during the COVID-19 recession. These losses are not abstract. They reflect labor that will never be done, care that will never be given, futures that will never unfold. Far from saving money, Trump’s agenda bleeds the very productivity it claims to protect.¹

Trump’s proposed cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act would strip healthcare access from tens of millions, especially in rural and working-class communities. His administration’s hostility toward public health agencies—from defunding the CDC to undermining the NIH—ensures that outbreaks will spread further, faster, and with fewer tools to stop them. Vaccines, HIV prevention, maternal health programs, addiction treatment—all are on the chopping block, framed as bloated “entitlements” or moral hazards.

But the necropolitical machinery doesn’t stop with health. It’s environmental. The 2025 Project envisions dismantling the EPA entirely. Clean air and water regulations are being repealed not despite the evidence that they save lives—but because they interfere with extractive profit. Pollution is no longer the byproduct of deregulation—it’s the method. If clean water makes a place livable, then exposure makes it exploitable.

It’s economic. Cuts to SNAP, rental assistance, and housing programs turn food and shelter into market privileges rather than basic human rights. The result? More evictions, more encampments, more unmarked graves. It’s legal. Immigration policies increasingly rely on “deterrence” through danger—border crossings policed not with mercy but with desert, detention, and death. It’s ideological. Reproductive healthcare is being criminalized with full knowledge that maternal and infant mortality will rise. The point is not just control—it’s selective abandonment.

In all of this, the patterns are not random. They are racialized, gendered, and classed. The necrostate doesn’t declare war on everyone—it simply revokes protections from those never fully counted. Black and Indigenous communities, the disabled, LGBTQ+ individuals, the poor, the undocumented, and the rural working class—these are the populations most exposed to environmental risk, medical neglect, and economic discard.

What we’re seeing is not just withdrawal of services, but the systematic exposure of certain communities to unlivable conditions. It is the repatriation of colonial logic—treating internal populations as disposable, governable not through investment but through neglect. What once defined the borderlands has now crept inward, enfolding more lives into its calculus of disposability. This is structured abandonment on a national scale.

And the cruelty is not hidden. It’s bureaucratized. You don’t need a gun when you have a means test. You don’t need a wall when you have a work requirement. Death comes not in dramatic acts of violence, but in the quiet efficiency of policy: the blackout that kills a child during a heat wave, the cancer caught too late, the insulin that never arrives. These aren’t individual tragedies. They’re structural features.

Meanwhile, the rituals of legitimacy continue. The same government that defunds clinics holds moments of silence. The same politicians who slash social care praise resilience. In this system, performance substitutes for protection. Mourning becomes a mask for complicity.

Even the rhetoric of scarcity is a performance. There is no actual shortage of funds—only a shortage of will to direct them toward public need. A government that can conjure trillions for tax cuts and weapons claims austerity only when the sick, the hungry, and the young come asking. This isn’t discipline—it’s moral triage.

What’s emerging is not the rollback of the welfare state—it’s its inversion. A state that once sought to buffer life’s risks now distributes them. A state that once claimed to serve the common good now defines freedom as exposure. What remains is a politics where life is provisional and death is a budgetary outcome.

But naming it matters. Because what’s framed as unfortunate, or inevitable, or the natural limits of government, is in fact a calculated political project—one that sorts lives into those worth protecting and those left to manage their own decline. Once life becomes conditional on profitability, solidarity becomes resistance.

We must be clear: what is being proposed is not just authoritarianism—it is engineered decay. It is a politics that sees no value in repair, no duty to care, and no future worth protecting for those who cannot pay for it. And it is happening in plain sight.

If democracy means anything, it must include the right to survive. Not just from violence or war, but from policy-crafted precarity. Rebuilding that foundation means rejecting not only the programs of death, but the worldview that justifies them: that markets are moral, that scarcity is natural, that freedom is the right to abandon others.

The necrostate thrives on silence. Let’s not give it ours.

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¹ Figures based on 2023 U.S. population (333 million) and GDP per capita ($70,000). Person-years lost multiplied by productivity yields $11.6 trillion for a half-year drop, $23.3 trillion for a full-year. Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; World Bank; CDC; Brookings Institution; Case & Deaton (2020); CDC Chronic Disease and Economic Cost Data.

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Suggested Readings

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Bailey, Sarah, and Sarah Reber. “The Costs of Poor Health in the U.S.” Brookings Institution, February 28, 2023. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-costs-of-poor-health-in-the-u-s/.

Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Chronic Disease and the Economic Burden of Poor Health.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/about/costs/index.htm.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.

Geronimus, Arline T. Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. High and Rising Mortality Rates Among Working-Age Adults in the United States: The Role of Socioeconomic and Behavioral Factors. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2021.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The U.S. War on Immigrants: Reframing the Border as the Crisis. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2023.