Heterologies

The Politics of Letting People Die: Republican Administrative Violence

When policy systematically eliminates vulnerable populations through bureaucratic means, we are witnessing the core mechanics of fascism. 

The story we are told about the October 2025 US Government shutdown is a familiar one: two political parties, unable to compromise, share equal blame for the resulting gridlock. This story assumes a symmetry of responsibility that, in this case, is a dangerous fiction.

When we look closely at the proposals on the table, a starkly different reality emerges. One party put forth legislation with quantifiable, deadly consequences. The other refused to authorize it. This was not a failure of compromise; it was a rationally justified moral judgment. The current budget fight is the latest front in a wider war of necropolitics—Achille Mbembe’s term for the use of state power to determine who may live and who must die.

The Trump Administration isn’t practicing governance as usual. It is the methodical elimination of vulnerable populations through bureaucratic means. To understand this, we must connect the proposed domestic healthcare cuts with the recent dismantling of international aid. They are two parts of the same coherent, and lethal, political project.

The Domestic Front: Cutting Healthcare and Medicaid

The Republican budget proposal was not a matter of abstract economics. Its consequences were calculated in human lives. The bill included $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act over ten years, leading to outcomes projected with grim accuracy: (Links to the Sources are below.)

  • 15 million Americans would lose their health insurance (Congressional Budget Office).
  • 51,000 additional Americans would die each year (Yale/Penn researchers).
  • Health insurance premiums would nearly double for 22 million Americans (Kaiser Family Foundation).

Senator Bernie Sanders stated the matter plainly: “When you throw 15 million low-income and working-class people off their health care… it is not shocking to understand that 50,000 of them will die unnecessarily every single year.” These are not speculative fears; they are statistical certainties.

The Global Precedent: Terminating USAID

These domestic cuts did not appear in a vacuum. They follow the blueprint established when the Trump administration’s Executive Order 14169 effectively dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), cutting 83% of its programs.

The numbers here are just as stark. A June 2025 study in The Lancet found that from 2001-2021, USAID funding prevented an estimated 92 million deaths. The same researchers modeled the consequences of the 2025 cuts: more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five. Researchers at Boston University estimate the cuts have already caused between 300,000 and 360,000 deaths.

The mechanism is identical to the proposed domestic cuts: bureaucratic barriers and funding cliffs prevent access to life-saving treatment. Vaccination programs are cancelled. Health clinics are shuttered. Tuberculosis prevention is terminated. Yet, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed before Congress that “no one has died because of USAID cuts”—a statement made while the bodies were, quite literally, being counted. This is not mere dishonesty but the normalization of denial as statecraft: Lying has become the main signature of Trump Administration officials. 

Violence by Budget Cuts

The populations differ—an HIV patient in South Sudan, a low-income American with diabetes—but the political technique is the same. This is necropolitics in action. It is not the spectacular violence of overt totalitarianism but a quieter, administrative violence. It operates through eligibility requirements, funding deadlines, and work mandates.

Policy is enacted in the name of “fiscal responsibility,” but it is designed to produce mortality while maintaining plausible deniability. When you cut healthcare funding knowing it will cause thousands of preventable deaths—when researchers can calculate precisely how many will die, and you proceed anyway—you are making a choice about whose lives matter.

The Illusion of Compromise

Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, Democrats 47. A budget requires 60 votes to pass. The Republican leadership offered no negotiation, only an ultimatum: accept our bill or we shut down the government. This is not an invitation to compromise; it is a demand for capitulation.

The moral choice facing Democrats was not between two competing harms. It was between the temporary disruption of a government shutdown and the permanent, irreversible policy of causing 51,000 additional deaths each year, indefinitely.

What, precisely, is the “compromise” position anyway? Shall we agree to only 25,000 preventable deaths? To strip insurance from only 7.5 million people? When a baseline policy creates categorical harm to human life, proportional compromise does not reduce moral culpability; it merely distributes it.

Calling It What It Is

Linguistic precision is vital. Republicans did not simply “propose budget cuts.” They proposed a policy that would predictably and massively increase mortality among the vulnerable. Democrats did not simply “refuse to compromise.” They declined to co-sign death warrants.

When we frame these positions as equivalent, we obscure the profound moral and political reality of the situation. The Trump administration has demonstrated, both at home and abroad, that it views certain populations as disposable.

That this lethal calculus is considered a debatable point reveals the success of a decades-long project. Libertarian think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, funded by a corporate donor class, have worked to reframe mass casualty as “fiscal conservatism.” We are prompted to treat the systematic elimination of the vulnerable as one side of a reasonable disagreement, all to justify further tax cuts for the wealthiest. This is not a failure of discourse; it is a manufactured normalization of brutality.

Let us be clear. When policies designed to produce predictable mortality become a negotiating position, we are no longer in the realm of normal politics. We are witnessing the mechanics of fascism, sanitized by spreadsheets and legislative jargon. The Democratic refusal to cosign this proposal is not partisan obstruction. It is the essential moral clarity of a political party asserting a foundational principle: human lives are not a bargaining chip.

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