There are quite a few categories of people who have reason to fear Donald Trump’s policy agenda for 2025, which he can be expected to pursue via a combination of executive actions and legislation (the latter made possible by Republican “trifecta” control of the White House and both congressional chambers). Most obviously, there are the undocumented immigrants being threatened with “mass deportation”; the federal employees who could lose their civil-service protections; women whose reproductive rights will almost certainly be limited by regulatory actions, particularly with respect to the distribution of abortion pills; and various “enemies of the people,” from prosecutors to pundits, who could face legal harassment or worse.

Those who depend on the federal government’s social safety net for survival are less explicitly, but quite definitely, at major risk thanks to the horrific fiscal arithmetic of Trump’s agenda, magnified by the Republican Party’s long-standing hostility to federal programs providing health care and other key assistance to low-income individuals and families. As the GOP’s legislative plans begin to come into focus, there are four major ways low-income people could be impacted.

It’s true that Republicans care most about debts and deficits when Democrats are in charge of the federal government; the GOP happily colluded in red-ink budgeting during Trump’s first term as president. But there are limits to what even the most hypocritical of conservatives can accept, particularly when it’s possible to look fiscally tough by pursing austerity policies many Republicans favor anyway. The most immediate reason for paying attention to the fiscal condition of the country is the end of the debt-limit suspension enacted in 2023, which will occur on January 2, 2025. The U.S. Treasury will be able to utilize “extraordinary measures” to avoid breaching the debt limit for a while, but without question, the day of reckoning will arrive during the first year of the new Trump-GOP regime. Presumably, a debt-limit measure will be nestled in some sort of must-pass legislation, but members of Congress from both parties will be reluctant to support it. So deficit-reduction........

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