# While our eyes are on the welfare state’s destruction, Trump is building a police state

Judith Levine

## Opinion
## US politics

### While our eyes are on the welfare state’s destruction, Trump is building a police state

Last week, the federal human resources department  ordering agencies to submit detailed plans on how they will work with the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to slash their payrolls. To do this, they were to eliminate whole job categories – except one. Untouchable were positions “necessary to meet law enforcement, border security, national security, immigration enforcement, or public safety responsibilities”.

While we’ve had our eyes on the wrecking ball – Doge pulverizing social services, environmental protection, and scientific research, we’ve hardly taken notice of what is being constructed. In the footprint of the already shabby, now half-demolished US welfare state, the  is building a police state.

In spite of Doge’s cuts to the FBI, the agency’s director, , is gearing up to turn the agency – whose job has always been to spy on US citizens, including enemies of the state as identified by the government in power – into Donald Trump’s personal secret police. At the state level, lawmakers are compiling their own enemies lists and filing bills to reward those who snitch on abortion seekers, transgender people, undocumented immigrants, and school librarians suspected of harboring the wrong books.

The Republican House budget includes  for defense and border control. Among the Senate budget committee’s  are finishing the border wall, increasing the number of immigrant detention “beds”, hiring more border patrol agents, and investing in state and local law enforcement to assist in “immigration enforcement and removal efforts”. While no figures are provided in the , the Senate budget committee assures Americans that any new spending will be offset by reductions.

> While we’ve had our eyes on the wrecking ball, we’ve hardly taken notice of what is being constructed

In spite of Doge’s cuts to the FBI, the agency’s director, , is gearing up to turn the agency – whose job has always been to spy on US citizens, including enemies of the state as identified by the government in power – into Donald Trump’s personal secret police. At the state level, lawmakers are compiling their own enemies lists and filing bills to reward those who snitch on abortion seekers, transgender people, undocumented immigrants, and school librarians suspected of harboring the wrong books.

The Republican House budget includes  for defense and border control. Among the Senate budget committee’s  are finishing the border wall, increasing the number of immigrant detention “beds”, hiring more border patrol agents, and investing in state and local law enforcement to assist in “immigration enforcement and removal efforts”. While no figures are provided in the , the Senate budget committee assures Americans that any new spending will be offset by reductions.

Private prison companies – the two largest contractors are GEO Group and CoreCivic – anticipate unprecedented revenues too. Implementation of the , which mandates locking up undocumented people charged not just with violent crimes but with offenses as trivial as shoplifting, will require a huge buildout of detention facilities; Project 2025  100,000 available beds daily. Flying deportees to their home countries could generate $40m to $50m of business, according to GEO’s executive chairperson. “We believe the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced,”  the chief executive officer, J David Donahue, on the company’s quarterly earnings call.

The removal of millions of migrants will necessitate more than software, planes, and prisons. It will need personnel. And wouldn’t you know it, an enterprising group of military contractors including the CEO of Blackwater has  to the Trump administration to deputize a mercenary border patrol of 10,000 private citizens. The plan also recommends payments to bounty hunters. Estimated cost: $25bn.

These surveillance technologies and tactics are not targeted solely at foreign and extraterrestrial invaders, however. Government drones  the Black Lives Matter protests of 2017; at a protest against Israel’s war on Gaza at New York University, a student called my attention to a police drone circling above. In 2021 SpaceX signed a $1.8bn contract with the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office for a network of low-orbiting spy satellites called Starshield. “A US government database of objects in orbit shows several SpaceX missions having deployed satellites that neither the company nor the government have ever acknowledged” but were identified by experts as Starshield prototypes,  reported. It is unclear whether the network will be used for military or domestic spying, but its reach is vast. Said one Reuters source: “No one can hide.”

The transformation of the US government is not just a matter of replacing an accountable civil service with self-interested private contractors. “It seems like they are using  to reshape the purpose of the government rather than execute it more efficiently,” Max Stier, president of the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service, told the .

That purpose, Trump tells us, is public safety from threats without and within. But a capitalist police state redefines public safety. Safety does not include housing or food security, disease prevention, or disaster relief. The state protects companies, not workers, consumers, or the environment. The “public” in “public safety” also attains new meaning: it embraces only native-born practitioners of the state religion, political loyalists, and favored profiteers.
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