# 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  priorities 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 a similar vein, some of those reductions involve  and  to local police. Clearly, the right hand doesn’t know what the other right hand is doing. Still, cuts are not always cuts. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has instructed senior staff to shave 8% off the department’s $850bn annual expenditures. Programs addressing the  and “excessive bureaucracy” are high on the list, of course. But, as the Intercept , savings will be repurposed for the president’s pet projects. For instance: the , an enormously complex, costly – and, critics say, unfeasible,  – space-based missile-defense and “warfighting” system that has been a fantasy of tech-drunk Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. In keeping with Trumpian décor and his “golden age of America”, the Iron Dome has recently been  the Golden Dome.

The Golden Dome might also be a symbol of what a state devoted to protecting itself from enemies real and imagined offers corporate America. Because as the civil service shrinks, private industry – particularly the overlapping defense and tech sectors – will . Project 2025, which is essentially being cut and pasted into Trump’s executive orders,  to “strengthen the defense industrial base”, stockpile ammunition and “modernize” the nukes, while streamlining procurement from private contractors and involving them in decisions about what to produce. With Tesla and SpaceX contracts worth  and of course, control of Doge, Elon Musk is already at the table. SpaceX practically  Nasa’s rocket launch and space travel programs, freaking out engineers familiar with its bargain-basement manufacturing practices – and failures. Next up: artificial intelligence to replace human expertise.

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Trump’s war on immigrants also promises a windfall. During his first term, and Joe Biden’s as well, the creation and operation of a “smart” border wall – comprising mobile towers, autonomous drones, thermal imaging, biometric data collection and artificial intelligence – funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to  and . A 2022  by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on border militarization and corporate outsourcing called border security a “for-profit industry”, which perpetuates itself by lobbying for ever more draconian crackdowns on migrants.

Those profits are about to explode. “The border security market is projected to reach $34.4 billion by 2029, from $26.8 billion in 2024,” with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics the biggest beneficiaries, according to the market research firm %3A,5.1%25%20during%20the%20forecast%20period.).

 – 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.”

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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.

As this inner circle shrinks, the outside expands. There are citizens and what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “margizens”, those who live in a country but do not benefit from its rights or protections. Not only are the margizens denied safety; they are deemed dangerous. To keep the nation “proud and prosperous and free”, as Trump described his America, the state will need to humiliate, impoverish, pursue, imprison and punish almost everyone.
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