Episode 219: How Elites Concern Troll ‘Waste’ to Gut Social Welfare and Divide the Working Class
Citations Needed | April 23, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “Poverty Plan Hit for Fraud, Waste,” reported the Associated Press in 1966. “Study says government waste is unbelievable,” insisted wire service UPI in 1983. “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines,” announced The New York Times in January of this year, 2025.
Adam: This is an argument that dates back decades, even centuries: Government is bloated, spending wastefully, and enabling widespread fraud and abuse. The only solution to this waste, fraud, and abuse is to root it out. Cutting salaries, personnel, or entire programs or agencies, it follows, will streamline government bodies, saving millions or billions of dollars.
Nima: But who gets to decide what’s wasteful in the first place? How are these concepts routinely racialized? And what effect does it have on a public that’s dependent on social programs and essential government services such as safety inspections? Why should governments be expected to, quote-unquote, “save” money when their job, at least in theory, isn’t to make money in the first place, but again, in theory, to improve the welfare of their own citizens?
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll detail the past and present of the waste, fraud, and abuse framing, looking at how it’s long been used to justify the erosion of essential social programs; mischaracterize governments as businesses; and weaken protections for workers, renters, and everyone else who isn’t a capital-owning member of the elite.
Nima: Later on the episode, we’ll be joined by Beatrice Adler Bolton, co-host of the Death Panel podcast, and co author with Artie verkant of the book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, which was published in 2022 by Verso Books.
[Begin clip]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: The narrative that we’re talking about here coalesces around essentially the kind of idea of who society is for. And ultimately, the roots of this framing lie in centuries of debate over who is counted as a valuable productive member of society and who is marked for abandonment. So Musk is really only just reviving and amplifying this divide between worker and surplus.
[End clip]
Adam: We have touched on this tangentially over the years, but have not done an episode on it, which is this idea that there’s a post-ideological, politically neutral, free-of-partisanship or ideological preferences, way of examining government as something full of waste, abuse, and fraud, which has now reached its nadir with the so-called DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency under Musk that has been slashing, undermining, making impossible to use essential government services like Social Security, chief among them, in an effort to supposedly cut waste, fraud, and abuse and redundancies, while handing out tens of billions of dollars in contracts to Elon Musk’s companies. This is not a hypocrisy gotcha as much as it is to show that this is a completely selective framework. It can be used against one’s perceived enemies, typically racialized or gendered, labor or programs or social services. Meanwhile, the bloat of Pentagon contracts, tax cuts for the wealthy, are not subject to this framework.
It is, a lot of what we discussed in the show, it is in principle, in theory, right, in a kind of frictionless vacuum, is something that makes sense. You don’t want things to be wasteful. You don’t want to have a perpetual motion machine sucking money from so-called taxpayers that digs a ditch and fills it in again, or whatever kind of phantom thing, again, in the abstract, one can conceive of that’s wasteful. You know, if you can employ a technology to save time, whether it’s crop yields or whether it’s administering social services, it makes sense to do that in the abstract. This is something that sort of appeals to our common sense. But what we will argue in this episode is that that’s largely horseshit, because that’s not, that kind of ostensibly value- or ideologically neutral framework is manifestly how it actually is implemented, is 0% of the time, that’s the case.
Nima: Right. The waste, fraud, and abuse line is not about waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s about making sure that poor people stay poor or have no services.
Adam: Which is pretty much what all this is about. And doing so i n a way that the media can kind of buy, as this media largely staffed by these ideologically impotent front-row kids who say, Oh, yeah, waste. You have to have your credulous hat on, going, Yeah, totally. We’ve talked about this with respect to DOGE, but we wanted to dig deeper into this concept, because it’s something, of course, Nima, like a lot of these things, it goes back many decades, if not centuries.
Nima: That’s right. This kind of framing actually does date back many hundreds of years. In his 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population, British economist Thomas Robert Malthus bemoaned his own government’s expenditures on the poor as futile and wasteful. Malthus wrote, quote, “the fact that nearly three millions are collected annually for the poor and yet that their distresses are not removed is the subject of continual astonishment.” End quote.
Malthus is, of course, best known for the central argument of this essay, which was that population growth would outpace food supply on Earth and therefore threatened to reduce the standards of living for all humans. Malthus advocated for the, quote, “total abolition of all the present parish laws,” end quote, which were laws providing government assistance to the poor. This was the apparent solution to the overpopulation vs. food supply conundrum. Malthus added in his essay, quote,
This would at any rate give liberty and freedom of action to the peasantry of England, which they can hardly be said to possess at present. They would then be able to settle without interruption, wherever there was a prospect of a greater plenty of work and a higher price for labour. The market of labour would then be free, and those obstacles removed which, as things are now, often for a considerable time prevent the price from rising according to the demand.
End quote. Now, a few decades later, in the 1820s and 1830s, on this side of the Atlantic in the United States, many Southern enslavers raised objectives to the federal proposals to invest more in roads, bridges and waterways, namely Henry Clay’s quote-unquote “American System.” These Southerners framed this as excessive spending, though their most pressing concern was likely increased restrictions on their ownership of slaves. And it should be noted here that Clay, Henry Clay, who was calling for this American System infrastructure work, himself was a slave owner. Now, some Southerners took to local newspapers at the time to air their grievances. In one example from September 4, 1832, the Fayetteville Weekly Observer published an anonymous North Carolinian who claimed that such spending was, quote, “calculated to increase our burdens or squander away our money.” End quote.
Adam: Now this messaging strategy persisted into post-Civil War years. According to professor and author Jack Schneider, writing for Jacobin in March of 2025, the opponents of reconstruction feared that, quote, “increasingly representative forms of government would undermine historical patterns of power and wealth.” Schneider added, quote,
With postwar reconstruction expanding voting rights to previously enslaved people, the fortunes of the Southern elite were threatened as never before by the specter of democracy. It was impossible for such elites to imagine “a greater wrong or greater tyranny in republican government.
Schneider would go on to say,
Enter claims of corruption. Those of us who remember only a little from these pages in our American history textbooks likely will recall reading about Northern “carpetbaggers” who sought to enrich themselves in the former Confederacy. As Southern apologist Horace Greeley put it, they “crawled down South on the track of our armies . . . stealing and plundering.” With the cooperation of “unprincipled scalawags from the South,” carpetbaggers ostensibly manipulated the newly freed black population to seize control of state governments and in turn line their pockets. Waste. Fraud. Abuse.
Unquote. This is similar to Episode 73: Western Media’s Narrow, Colonial Definition of ‘Corruption’ with guest Jason Hickel. This is indeed a spiritual successor. The idea is that you take this thing again, that’s sort of seemingly value-neutral, or ideologically neutral, this idea of corruption, in this case, waste, fraud, and abuse, which is obviously very similar, and you selectively impose it upon programs or political currents that you don’t like. Meanwhile, the normal routine corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse done by the ruling elite at the time, or the kind of privileged elite, is either ignored or hand-waved away. And so this is a dynamic we see play out over the centuries with fraud, waste, and abuse framework, is that when a government program is redistributive, or, God forbid, racialized, it’s sort of seen as giving money to Black people who, again, after the Civil War, magically turn from good, reliant, compliant workers genetically to layabouts, like, overnight in terms of how they’re perceived in the media and propaganda, then that seems wasteful, that it’s creating sloth and all these kind of moral deficiencies created by taking rich people’s money, because obviously they themselves are hardworking, even though the etymology of the term ‘gentleman’ is literally a person who doesn’t work.
Nima: So yeah, Adam, over the centuries of this argument being used, utilized, kind of weaponized, against any positive social services, little changed narratively, right? The arguments continued. We saw this through the New Deal. Arguments against redistributive policies, worker programs, social services, the advent of Social Security as well. And by the 1960s, this continued. At the time, the Johnson administration, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the so-called War on Poverty, which involved a new series of socia- safety-net initiatives such as increasing federal funding for education and establishing Medicaid and Medicare. But Republican lawmakers at the time, including future President Gerald Ford, promptly attacked the program as–what else? — useless and wasteful. Here is an Associated Press headline from March 1966 it reads, quote, “Poverty Plan Hit for Fraud, Waste.” The story begins this way, quote,
Republican congressional leaders say the administration’s anti-poverty program has been marked by politics, fraud, waste, and other abuses and called for a special investigation.
Sen. Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois and Rep. Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, said they will introduce legislation to create an investigating committee composed of six senators and six House members drawn in equal numbers from both parties.
Dirksen, the Senate Republican leader, said that $2.3 billion will have been spent on the program by July 1, and the administration is asking for $1.7 billion more for the next fiscal year.
“For these vast sums, the American people and the poor have gotten a very shabby product,” he said.
Adam: Now, Gerald Ford voted against all legislative efforts to limit or end United States involvement in Southeast Asia or to reduce military spending, which ran to the multiple billions. That’s never wasteful, which is a theme you’ll see in this episode.
Nima: Invade, occupy, bomb other countries, not wasteful.
Adam: Kill 3 million people in Indochina. That’s just the cost of doing business. That doesn’t count as waste. The New York Times published a report on August 9, 1974, the same day Ford assumed the presidency after Richard Nixon resigned, noting that Ford stated the US spending on, quote, foreign aid was, quote, “getting marginally thin,” unquote. Ford added, quote, “We are very close to the point in dollars where we might lose our leadership,” unquote. This is in reference not to foreign aid, in the sense of bags of rice, but is in reference to military aid.
The New York Times softened Ford’s belligerence headlining its report, quote, “Ford Sees Himself as an Internationalist and a Moderate on Domestic Issues,” unquote. Internationalist being a code word for wanting to continue to fight the Cold War and to boost military spending and the wake of the, I guess, during the process of the manifest defeat of US forces in Southeast Asia.
Nima: This takes us right into the 1980s. Gerald Ford was laying the groundwork, of course, for Ronald Reagan’s own presidency. In 1982, during Reagan’s first term, he authorized the formation of a group of over 150 corporate executives to make decisions about federal spending. The initiative would be known as the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, or more casually, the Grace Commission, named after its chair, J. Peter Grace, then the CEO of the chemicals company W.R. Grace & Co.
Here’s a clip of President Ronald Reagan speaking at a luncheon for the commission using the ‘inefficiency’ rhetoric that had become rather well established by this point.
[Begin clip]
Ronald Reagan: Be bold. We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency.
[End clip]
Adam: Now, American news media largely embraced this inefficiency, waste, redundancy rhetoric, even while ostensibly doing critical reporting on the commission. For example, in November of 1982, the commission came under some Congressional scrutiny for conflicts of interest, yet in its reporting on this, United Press International still accepted the premise of the commission’s creation, writing that it was founded, quote, “to search out waste and inefficiency in the federal government,” unquote. Of course, ‘waste’ to this group overwhelmingly meant funding for social programs meant to help the poor, federal workers, regulation, and to some extent, even soft power aids like USAID. If this is looking familiar, there’s a reason for it.
In 1983, the Grace Commission proposed a quote combined welfare administration unquote, to effectively consolidate Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and Medicaid. Though the Grace Commission claimed the move forward would prevent, quote, “duplication,” unquote, its real purpose was to slash spending on these programs by $1 to $5 billion, according to estimates at the time. Yet UPI took no issue with this, publishing a May 1983 headline that read quote, “Study says government waste is unbelievable.” There’s not even a quote there. UPI would write in its text, quote, “A Presidential Task Force charged Monday government waste is, “unbelievable” and detailed how $30.1 billions in savings and potential new revenue could be achieved in three years.”
End quote. Now, we should note that the use of the word ‘savings’ as though the federal government is a business, this is a framing the New York Times has adopted when discussing the so-called DOGE commission repeatedly, Elon Musk is finding savings. Now it’s really interesting, because it’s not really sure what this means, because it’s not clear who is actually saving money, or what that means to save money. The federal government prints money. So if it saves money, where does that money go? It goes off some ledger, presumably somewhere. The implication with the savings framing is that somehow, if the government creates some efficiency, or cuts waste, or even just cuts a program, that that money just magically appears in the bank account of Joe Six-Pack. But that, of course, is not what happens, because governments, unlike companies, are not supposed to generate profits in return for shareholders. Governments are supposed to provide things like education, healthcare, and that is how its successes are to be measured, not P and L, like a business.
And one of the benefits of this waste framework is that it very subtly, and sometimes quite explicitly, shifts the very way in which we view the government. It shifts the way in which we view the purpose of government by speaking about it in these sort of MBA, P and L terms. And this is a framing that, again, media largely adopts because it would take too much time and space to problematize or to question them, and questioning that would be perceived as being ideological. So slowly, these concepts go from being put in scare quotes to just being adopted as the framework that the US media uses. Again, as we’ve discussed a million times in News Briefs with respect to DOGE, is the idea of savings, of eliminating waste, as if Elon Musk, a government contractor for over $35 billion in government contracts, as if he gives a shit about government waste at all. So everything’s kind of taken at face value, and the US media is just basically taking the posture of a child on Christmas Eve, sitting by the window waiting for Santa Claus. There is that level of credulity.
Nima: So let’s go back to this UPI article from May 1983. It has all the common tropes, as we said, it talks about avoiding, quote-unquote, “duplication” in public assistance programs such as Medicaid and food stamps. Who’s going to root out the waste? Who’s going to leave no stone unturned? American business leaders, right? They’re the ones who are going to, in the words of this article, quote, “curb runaway government spending and staggering federal deficits,” end quote. So here UPI just takes at face value the Grace Commission’s claims about preventing, quote-unquote, “duplication,” even though there is no evidence of redundancy or waste or abuse provided. Its implication is just that funding food stamps and Medicaid is itself a form of quote-unquote, “runaway government spending” that leads to high deficits. There’s kind of just an implication that these are connected without talking about what is actually meant by waste, fraud, and abuse, and it’s because this is what they actually mean.
Now, by 1984, the Grace Commission would release a series of recommendations for cuts to government spending. The report estimated potential, quote-unquote, “savings” over a five-year period from 1985 to 1989. And which areas were most aggressively targeted, Adam? Social services and funding for public-sector workers. By the commission’s recommendations, the government would, quote-unquote, “save” the following amounts over the next five years.
On “National defense,” it would save $13.7 billion. On “Entitlements and other mandatory spending programs,” it would save $50.6 billion. Over “Nondefense discretionary spending and offsetting receipts,” it would save $23.3 billion. And for “Federal civilian employment and compensation,” it would save $30.2 billion.
Adam: So $100 billion for social welfare and 13 billion for quote-unquote, “national defense.” Got it.
Nima: Now, the New York Times published a glossy 1984 profile of Grace himself, the chairman, around the time that the commission’s report came out, calling Grace, quote, “A Foe of Federal Waste,” end quote, and portraying his recommendations as neutral, dispassionate, if not a bit, quote-unquote, “controversial.” The paper accepted Grace’s framing of things like pensions and retirement funds as wasteful, stating this, quote,
the proposals contain many controversial suggestions that Mr. Grace and his team will have to defend. One would try to bring Civil Service retirement and pensions provisions more in line with those in non-Government plans, at a great saving to the Government.
End quote.
Adam: Again, it’s not clear who’s saving anything that same year, in 1984 Peter Grace and syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson founded a group called Citizens Against Waste, a lobbying group designed to minimize or eliminate corporate regulation and taxes, funded by corporate America, and to gut social service. At the time, the Washington Post described the organization as part of a, quote, “crusade against federal waste,” unquote. Simultaneously, Peter Grace, via his company, W. R. Grace, was pouring millions of dollars into an anti-waste TV and print advertising campaign. Here’s a clip from one of the commercials that ran on TV from 1985.
[Begin clip]
Man: Morning. Shall we get down to business? Now that you’ve joined us, you’ll enjoy numerous rights and privileges, but you’ll share certain problems as well. Specifically, you owe the United States government, in round numbers, $50,000.
[Baby cries]
Voiceover: If federal deficits continue at their current rate, it’s as if every baby born in 1985 will have a $50,000 debt strapped to its back.
Man: Let us review these figures for you.
Voiceover: At W.R. Grace & Co., we’re not looking for someone to blame. We’re too busy crying out for help. Write to Congress. If you don’t think that’ll do it, run for Congress.
Man: Now, if you’ll just sign here.
Voiceover: The last thing we want now is our kids following in our footsteps.
[End clip]
Adam: So this is a recurring pattern we’ve talked about in the show a lot, this kind of Pete Peterson, that your baby is going to be pinned with a $50,000 bill they have to pay. Now, I was born the year that Citizens Against Waste was founded, and I don’t think I’ve been stuck with this $50,000 bill. In fact, maybe I’m the baby in that commercial. Maybe my parents wanted me to be a child actor. So it’s unclear what that even means. They keep talking about this bill we have to pay. At some point, it’s like, yeah, that’s not the way deficit spending works in this country. Again, they’ve been doing this boogie-boogie scare story because they realize it’s powerful and it’s effective, and it convinces people to call their Congressman and tell them to cut government so-called waste, which is another saying cut programs that help the poor and support tax cuts for the wealthy. Now they won’t talk about the tax cuts for the wealthy because they have to take on this deficit posture, but ultimately, those always go hand-in-hand, right?
Nima: And again, who is in charge of leading the investigation for waste, fraud and abuse? It’s a bunch of corporate leaders, and the head of it, that CEO of a chemicals company, is the so-called crusader against waste, right? So, I mean, the parallels are a bit stark right now.
Adam: Now this P and L framework was used constantly to demagogue the Post Office throughout the years. And the Post Office, which was established in the US Constitution in the 1780s, is meant to be again part of social welfare, part of the greater good. It helps the poor and the rich alike, at least in theory. But this is obviously vulgar to the forces of austerity and corporate and privatization. And so slowly, over the years, the post office was taken from this idea of a government service into a P and L, or corporate system run by the government to slowly kind of wean it off the social welfare framework that it was originally founded to be.
Nima: Yeah. Now this was more than just in messaging or in the language used to describe the Post Office, this was actually established in law. Originally, the Post Office was a cabinet Department called the US Post Office Department. But in 1970, in August 1970, following a lot of labor unrest on the part of postal workers themselves, Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which abolished the constitutionally mandated US Post Office Department and turned it into the US Postal Service, which we know today, a pseudo-autonomous government agency that acts more like a corporation than a social service.
As part of this act, postal workers won the right to collectively bargain, although they could not strike legally. But also, the Postal Reorganization Act required the Postal Service to break even financially over time. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, or the Postal Act of 2006, is another US federal statute that was enacted by Congress and signed into law by George W. Bush on December 20 of that year, 2006. This one overhauled the US Postal Service, blaming the financial crisis of 2001 for making the Postal Service insolvent. This new act required the Postal Service to adopt a profit-or-loss model, where they report earnings, revenue, and profit to Congress each year, therefore leading to a constant stream of media articles adopting this premise as well, the idea that the Postal Service keeps losing money.
Adam: So, New York Times, from September of 2011, quote, “Postal Service Is Nearing Default as Losses Mount.” NBC News, “U.S. Postal Service Posts $5.1 Billion Loss, Down Slightly From 2014.” CBS, November of 2024, “After two ‘Forever’ postage stamp hikes, the USPS lost nearly $10 billion in 2024.” “US Postal Service warns it must continue cost cuts or risk bailout,” Reuters, November of 2024. The Guardian, February of 2025, “US postmaster to step down months after reporting billions in losses.”
So we constantly see the stream of headlines about Post Office losing billions, and then that raises the question, how does the Post Office lose billions? It’s supposed to be independently funded by revenue it generates for charging for its services. Rather than saying, this is kind of an absurd framing, because that’s just a contrivance made by Congress in 2006. Previously, it didn’t need to generate profits. Again, we don’t ask why the Pentagon is not generating revenue every year. We don’t ask why the US Department of Navy is losing billions of dollars a year. It is simply asserted that the Post Office, again, is supposed to be this business-like model, which again, is kind of how Congress created it, but it still kept its statutory requirement to serve every part of the country, which is probably one of the reasons why it so-called loses profit every year.
So again, this kind of austerity framing is just an ideological assertion. It is not a law of nature. There’s no reason why the Post Office, again, the Postal Service in dozens and dozens of other countries, isn’t said to lose money every year, whatever that means. It is purely a capitalist framing that’s asserted and codified in law and repeated by the media as something that is a law of nature. It’s taken as something that is taken for granted, like the Post Office is supposed to generate revenue. But the Post Office isn’t supposed to generate revenue. It provides a social service. And again, this kind of austerity framing as is put on social welfare and things that help the public good, and meanwhile, that which entrenches power and generates revenue and money for lobbyists in the military state is simply taken for granted as something that the government ought to spend money on that is not supposed to be put under this austerity, capitalist framework.
Nima: Which brings us to the present day. Since Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, his administration has deputized Elon Musk to do effectively the same thing as the Grace Commission, but even more aggressively, via the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. And yes, we have discussed this previously in News Briefs and some other recent episodes, but it is extremely relevant right now. Now, of course, Trump and Musk have echoed the framing of Reagan and Peter Grace back in the 1980s and, for the most part, since the 2024 election, media has done so as well. A November 14, 2024 CNN article, for instance, opens with this line. Quote, “President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk have big ambitions for making the federal government leaner and more efficient by reviewing its budget and operations from top to bottom,” end quote.
What, of course, would make government leaner, you ask? Well, of course, gutting the Department of Education, for instance, and food stamps, and home heating assistance, and housing aid, and food-safety inspections, and all manner of US infrastructure. The most critical portions of the article cited quote-unquote, “budget experts,” including people like Larry Summers, treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who simply questioned the amount of gutting that Musk would actually be able to accomplish.
Now Musk, of course, has made his own racist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-worker neo-Nazi ideology perfectly clear over the years, and he’s used his newfound control in the federal government, under Donald Trump’s administration, to realize this vision. Yet CNN still accepted the basic premise of efficiency, writing this in that article, quote, “Actual savings from cutting waste, fraud and abuse would likely total between $150 billion and $200 billion, Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, posted on X.” End quote.
Adam: Now by early February 2025, Musk threatened to shut down, or was already in the process of shutting down, in part or in whole, USAID, the Office of Personnel Management, Government Services Administration, Small Business Administration, and a host of potential federal government agencies. Now, while some in Musk and Trump’s orbit have claimed they’re going to slash the Pentagon, they absolutely 100% were not doing that. And in fact, on Monday, April 7, Trump announced he wants a Pentagon budget over a trillion dollars. This would be the first trillion-dollar military budget ever, just a pure military budget, not including CIA and supplemental packages to Israel, etc., increasing the budget by the military of $150 billion, several billion of which, of course, goes to Elon Musk himself.
As I explained in my Substack, when I wrote about this, major media organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post, in addition to the aforementioned CNN, for months, largely represented DOGE, and still do, to some extent today, as a good-faith, post-ideological effort to quote, “cut costs,” quote, “find savings,” quote, “increase efficiencies.” The New York Times Washington Post, and CNN overwhelmingly avoided words like “right-wing,” “ideological,” “conservative,” or even any mention, even implicitly, of Musk’s personal far-right ideological disposition, for which there is years and years and years of evidence.
And this far-right ideological attack on the liberal state reached its low point on January 31, 2025, when the New York Times wrote an article, quote, “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines,” unquote, which framed it as actually the outgrowth of a bipartisan effort to, quote, “balance the budget,” unquote. Now the article would frame Musk and Trump’s ideological assault on the liberal state as, quote, “balance and budget politics,” unquote. The article’s subheadline would read, quote, “There is a long, bipartisan history of attempts to rein in spending and address concerns about government inefficiencies, though the parties have grown increasingly divided about what to cut.” Unquote.
So don’t you see, this is just Musk’s attack on the federal state, the liberal state, the social safety nets, that which he views as welfare or gendered or racialized or helping out people with disabilities. His eugenicist far-right ideology is kind of not really relevant. This is just an outgrowth of a bipartisan effort to increase efficiencies and cut wastes. These are not people with ideologies, Nima. They’re just people who really, really, really don’t like waste.
Nima: Yes, they hate inefficiency so damn much. That’s really what they care most about. To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by Beatrice Adler Bolton, co-host of the Death Panel podcast, which is about the political economy of health. She’s also the co-author with Artie Vierkant, her co-host, of the book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, which was published by Verso Books in 2022. Beatrice will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by Beatrice Adler-Bolton. Beatrice, it’s so great to have you back on Citations Needed.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Thanks so much. It’s so great to be back.
Adam: We want to begin by talking about this concept of waste. When you wrote the book, you wouldn’t know that Elon Musk and DOGE and all this kind of waste discourse would be so prominent, but it now is. And so you’re the most prominent waste expert, or the weaponization of waste, I should say. As this sort of pseudo-, post-ideological, value-neutral concept that we can all agree on what waste is, and waste is obviously bad, that there’s this closed system of entropy, and we want to reduce the waste of energy that comes out of the steam engine of government and corporations. Now it’s just sort of taken for granted, with a lot of people, a lot of Americans, unfortunately, that there’s kind of trillions of dollars of kind of undue spending that goes into a black hole of either malingering deadbeats or corrupt officials who sort of sit around and watch The Price Is Right all day.
Now, no one ever really produces any evidence of this, but it feels vaguely true, and a high percentage of Americans, unfortunately, are kind of thoroughly conditioned to believe this is the case, that the author of their suffering is not their boss who’s kind of extracting their wealth or oppressing them, or environmental pollution that’s harming them. It’s, there’s some kind of welfare queen off somewhere, living off their work, right? I think that’s a kind of fair generalization for a lot of people. And so Musk’s waste framing is very effective because it kind of appeals to this PR gimmick, this general perception of sponges mooching off of the hard workers, which is always me, by the way, even if I have a bullshit email job, I’m a hard worker.
I want to talk about what the kind of ideological antecedents of this framework is. Obviously, it’s been around for decades, if not much longer, in terms of rightwing think tanks, John Stossel has been, there’s been sort of very popular kind of pop culture, talk about the antecedents of this and why you think this framing has been as effective as it has, despite Musk being sort of an objectively polarizing and gross figure.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Well, I think it’s really important to, from the very top, emphasize as strongly as possible that Musk’s use of this waste framing is only effective because it taps into a very deep, longstanding narrative about who deserves support and why we can’t have nice things in a capitalist country like the United States. And this narrative has been shaped over centuries. It actually predates the United States. In Health Communism, we trace it back to the British Poor Laws, and that’s not because it originates there. That’s because we had to pick a point in which to start the story, and we could have gone back much further, but the narrative that we’re talking about here coalesces around essentially the kind of idea of who society is for and ultimately, the roots of this framing lie in centuries of debate over who is counted as a valuable productive member of society, and who is marked for abandonment.
So Musk is really only just reviving and amplifying this divide between worker and surplus, turning it into a wedge issue, for sure, but this is effective because it reinforces capitalism’s core premise that human worth is tied to economic productivity, and that there is a kind of zero-sum relationship to all needs being met. If you’re getting something, it’s coming because someone else is not getting something. And so while he claims that public resources are being squandered, he’s really not just talking about money when he invokes waste, and I think that’s really, really important. He might not be saying it outright when he’s implying that there is all this spending that can be cut in order to make the government more efficient. That, I think, is taken by a lot of people at face value.
But what he’s really talking about is that some people don’t deserve care services and support. It might sound like the ideas to make the government work for more people when you invoke efficiency. But the important thing is that what we’re talking about here is a really longstanding debate between what is worthy and unworthy spending, essentially by the state. And so privatization is kind of the ultimate goal here. It’s not about making people’s lives better. It’s about, first, rendering public systems dysfunctional, and then selling off the wreckage.
When we think about examples from history where this really was maybe more obvious in terms of a relationship between like connecting this waste framing directly to individuals, obviously Reagan’s Welfare Queen comes to mind, where you have individuals blamed for the country going into the red directly. But an example we talk about in Health Communism that I think is also really important is much earlier. It’s from the early 20th century. You have Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, who was an executive at Prudential insurance company and became a very prominent figure in the anti-socialized medicine movement in the early 20th century. And he was not only a racist and a vowed eugenicist, he was also a statistician, and he used quantitative analysis to argue that public-health insurance programs and universal healthcare were fundamentally wasteful, that they produced malingering, that they produced loafing, and essentially that private insurance was far superior as a result.
And his tactics throughout the 1910s to essentially just protect the capitalist class and insulate businesses from having to be a part of a socialized medicine system, and businesses of healthcare, for example, was really to kind of paint this as a eugenic and debt burden on the nation. He mobilized statistical evidence as a weapon against, essentially threats to the private insurance industry and towards giving the private insurance industry a larger purview. And I think this is really important in terms of understanding why, in the United States today, we don’t have universal healthcare, that we don’t have an American NHS. His main argument to demonstrate why this was a bad thing for the United States was to point to Germany and to say that Germany had fallen prey to a eugenic and debt burden, and that it was plagued by malingering, and he created these statistical analyses of malingering that were based on junk data, leveraging his scientific authority in order to make the case essentially for privatization in the United States.
Now, that narrative that he’s tapping into, obviously decades later, as part of Nazi Germany, is best epitomized as the framing of a useless eater, which was incredibly important in terms of manufacturing consent for the multiple genocides carried out under the Nazi regime. But this is really part of a broader arc, both Musk and Hoffman, a century apart, this is part of a broader effort to essentially label public spending, especially on health, especially on support for people who are poor, for people who are not business owners, the owning class, landlords, as a drain on society. And this approach, which emphasizes supposed inefficiencies and malingering within public programs that can be solved through statistical analyses, whether it’s done by hand in the case of Hoffman, or whether it’s done via AI and through the DOGE architecture of sending in a bunch of computer science students into the government to tinker with the systems, really is just about laying the ideological groundwork of saying that the problems with the state, with the nation, with the government, the problems with your life, don’t have anything to do with the systems that we’ve set up. They have everything to do with these individuals that we will use statistical analysis to root out, and once we’ve cleansed those people and that waste out of our systems, that they will be pure and that you will have a better life.
Nima: This idea of making these arguments using some of the fundamental building blocks of storytelling, of hero and villain, is something that I’d love to kind of dig into. And Beatrice, in your book, as you’ve been saying, Health Communism, there’s a chapter entitled “Waste,” and in that, you and Artie, your co-author, write that, quote,
“Where movements to resist socialized medicine have appeared among industry groups and professional stakeholders, a profound language of burden appears,” end quote.
And I want to talk about what this language does, not just in kind of moving policy, but who it’s meant for, who is the audience? Because it sets up this idea that, because of the inherent benefits of, say, divide-and-conquer politics, right, which is always like a, Heads, I win, tails, you lose, for those who already have power in our systems, it also serves to really flatter a certain kind of audience. Right? As Adam mentioned before, it’s never you, the intended audience for this messaging, who is a burden, and it’s never us, the messengers part of the system, who are the cause of your burden. It’s only those people over there. And that those people you can just kind of mad-lib with whatever group you want to marginalize, whichever group you want to destroy, whichever group you want to harm. And so, Beatrice, I’d love for you to talk about how this language of waste and burden, and as you said, the idea of a debt burden on society, is not only, as we’ve been saying, eugenicist in conception, but also how is this kind of language and the use of certain words, certain phrases, and certain narratives so essential to erode universal programs and universalist visions of care and health while simultaneously flattering people’s self-perception as their own kind of Randian heroes in the world, set against the moochers and the takers?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that we have to be careful of here is to kind of do the same thing of locating the problem in other people. Because ultimately, the problem is not that people fall for this line. It’s the way that this line, over and over and over again, effectively really undermines solidarity, undermines the case for universalist programs, but more importantly, it moralizes scarcity. So we’re talking about, ultimately, whether it’s placing the blame on the people who believe this lie, or placing the blame on the people that are targeted by this lie, we can easily fall into the trap of placing blame on other people in the circumstance, when ultimately the problem is the system itself. And this language of debt burden is often used as an excuse and a misdirection. It’s a way of avoiding talking about why we really can’t have nice things. It’s not about a refusal in our political economy to meet people’s needs, to give people a dignified life worth living, to give people what they need in order to have choice over where they work. This is about labor discipline. It’s about coercion. And what are the kind of dynamics that keep people working and that keep wages suppressed, ultimately?
And rather than talking about wage suppression, or rather than talking about why you work three jobs and you still can’t afford rent, as being a problem of our political economy, really tailoring every possible advantage to your landlord, for example, it’s much easier to say, Well, lest these other people over there, we would have nice things, we would have stability. But ultimately, who is being flattered by this framing is the neoliberal subject, the kind of person who sees themselves as self-made, someone who believes in the fantasy that they’re a historic and heroic striver and that they’re just being held back by moochers and parasites. And this discourse of waste is designed ultimately to attack the very idea of a universal program. Because if there are some people who are just moochers and parasites, then if a program was universal, you would have all these free riders. And sometimes this is even actually called the free rider problem, which is the idea that if there are too many people taking from the system without paying in, that a system becomes unsustainable.
And you see this in Musk’s framing of calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. This is an entitlement program where people pay in through taxes on their wages, and then when they retire, they draw out of the program, right? It’s a perpetually self-funding system where younger generations are putting money in and older generations are taking money out. That does not make it a Ponzi scheme. That’s just how Congress designed the program. Congress could have funded the program any number of ways. The United States makes its own money. It prints its own currency. We could change the funding mechanism to direct appropriations for Social Security and not have direct payroll taxes, and it would still work. And it would not be a problem. But this is him really kind of focusing on a very minute, and kind of rote, technocratic administrative detail of the program in order to essentially paint the entire system of Social Security as a fraudulent scheme where, essentially the older robbing the young, right? Where the takers are robbing the makers.
And this is really just, ultimately, part of the longer narrative of sort of just framing public goods as easily mismanaged and exploited and private goods as immune to this kind of exploitation, which is obviously not true. Because ultimately what they’re working against here is the idea that if universality in programs is accepted, right, if we were to implement something like universal healthcare in the United States, if we had Medicare for all in the United States, the logic of means-testing and exclusion and the kind of idea of there being two tiers or three tiers or four tiers or five tiers of healthcare that you could access in this country, that you’re only entitled to the survival that you can buy, that you can afford based on your wage, completely falls apart. And so it’s partially about keeping things away from people, but it’s also about upholding the idea that our society is only for certain people, that person obviously not being the actual neoliberal subject, but being the owning class, this is a kind of engine of white supremacy, and also of real class stratification in the United States. And it’s also a way of avoiding having a conversation about that specifically, and talking instead about how the problem is really just other people. It’s your neighbor, it’s that person at the grocery store on food stamps.
Adam: Right. It turns you into someone who’s constantly on those sort of vigilant and paranoid. You know, it’s interesting. You seeing this play on a kind of micro level. When I used to wait tables in New York City for several years, the obvious thing you want to do is to mitigate risk and to keep a sense of stability, is you would pool tips. And this is more common now than it was maybe 10 years ago, or 12 years ago when I did this. And there was always this manager who would sort of take aside some waiters and be like, Oh, you don’t want to pool tips. You’re such a strong server, we’re going to give you the best section. You don’t want to do that, right? There’s sort of flattery, right? They were their own Randian hero, and you don’t want the weak servers to sort of suck on the tit or whatever. And seeing a sort of micro-version of that play out, even though it’s in everyone’s best interest to pool in terms of it’s more efficient.
And I think on some level, they’re appealing to a primitive, maybe part of our primate brain, which is, it is true in a world of, like, high scarcity, for 99% of humanity in the savanna of Central Africa, or whatever, right? In early human history, you either kill the gazelle and eat, or you don’t, or you sort of plant the crops, or you starve to death. There was genuine scarcity for a great deal of human history, and there’s a sense that, like a culture that pushes people into working as much as possible was more likely to survive. And there’s sort of a primitive appeal to it.
Now, of course, that hasn’t really been the case for several centuries. I mean, especially in certain societies. And then you add to the fact that the managerial and wealthy and CEO class doesn’t actually produce anything, right? Even in this kind of primitive logic. I think it does kind of appeal to a sort of part of our monkey brain that says, like, Yeah, someone has to work. No matter your society, whether it’s capitalist, communist, socialist, democratic socialist, whatever it is. Someone has to clean the toilet, someone has to serve your food, someone has to drive the Uber. Someone has to, whatever it is, whatever sort of essential work it is. Maybe, maybe Uber is not essential, but whatever the sort of essential work of sustaining society is, someone has to do that. And of course, the socialist response is sure, obviously, and that person should be well compensated. And also, again, look at this parasitic CEO class that just sits around and moves numbers around on a screen. We could sort of do the who’s producing, who’s not argument all day.
But fundamentally, it appeals to a scarcity logic that feels very much selective, bad-faith, and really antiquated. So if there was, like, a sort of globe-emoji guy here or libertarian who says, like, Look, we can’t just print money ad infinitum, right? You can use the US as an excuse. You can do the sort of MMT argument, but not every country’s the United States, right? If we were El Salvador, or if we were Bulgaria, we can’t just endlessly print money. So there is, at some point along the chain, some kind of sense that there is not infinite resources. My argument would be like, obviously we’re not remotely there. And also we should look at who actually gets super, super rich and who has all the resources. But what would you say to that globe emoji, who says like, This is just far-left, grad-school fantasy talk that is not limited by the realities of economics?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: I would say that really, I’m only talking about, what if we funded Social Security with a blank check the way we funded the military, then seniors wouldn’t be living on $12,000 a year. I’m not even getting into monetary policy here. I’m just talking about basic congressional appropriations and decision-making that we’ve had for a long time in this country about what the priority is. Is it meeting people’s needs, or is it funneling money into defense industries? Ruth Gilmore talks about this fantastically, in the context of states and state finances, not even like federal finances, in her book Golden Gulag, where she talks about the transition from the kind of warfare industry in California to the industry of mass incarceration, and the ways that the state kind of moves money around in order to build up wealth for some people at the expense of other people, and by the expense of other people, I mean by capturing and disappearing generations of Black people in California through mass incarceration.
Ultimately, what we’re talking about here is, when we say the neoliberal subject, we’re talking about someone who thinks of themselves as an individual economic unit, who is responsible for their own success and failure, which ultimately is one of the biggest myths in our contemporary society. This is what the globe-emoji myth is, that we are capable of controlling our own destiny within the society that we live in, and that’s absolutely not true. I think it’s also worth pointing out that the kind of survival of the fittest ideology, this idea that is often tied to Charles Darwin, is actually not part of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is something that was conceptualized by his cousin, Sir Francis Galton, who’s the father of eugenics. So survival of the fittest as a kind of narrative ignores the fact that for all of human history, our survival has been based on cooperation, not on getting resources before someone else can get them. What the kind of modern understanding of survival is is that there’s a finite number of resources, and if you don’t get those resources, someone else is getting them, and it’s a battle to the teeth, your survival is dependent on you getting one over on someone else, whoever that other person is.
And I’m not saying that resource constraints aren’t real. I’m saying that what that discourse tells us to look away from is our priorities, is our provisioning. What are we putting our energy and time into? And yes, the kind of socialist argument is that these functions need to happen and that people should be compensated properly. On one hand, that’s one way to talk about it. Another way to talk about it is like, what are we putting our time and energy into reproducing as a society? Do we want to put all this time and energy into the kind of industries that don’t support a decent life, that don’t support thriving? All the investment going into financial technology of surveillance and capture and enclosure, whether that’s people who make their money off of charging hundreds of dollars for video calls for people who are incarcerated, or the system of incarceration itself, or we’re talking about parasites, or we’re talking about the ways that police budgets waste money in the United States. We’re never looking at the kind of buildup of military equipment that local police departments, just for example, spent tons and tons of COVID stimulus money on arming themselves essentially, and beefing up surveillance equipment, that’s never discussed as waste, because our priority is to funnel money into surveillance, control and coercion, not into survival.
And so ultimately, I think the most important thing to do when you encounter the narrative of waste and burden is to kind of take a step back and say, Who am I being asked to blame here for the struggles that I’m experiencing? Who am I being told is essentially responsible for me not thriving or me not feeling secure? Who is responsible for my insecurity? And it’s not your neighbor. It’s not the person who is your Instacart shopper who fucks up your order. It’s not the server in a restaurant who’s working on tips. It is not someone who’s unhoused and needs services. It’s not someone on Medicaid. It’s not a single mother not working. It is our priorities, and where we’re willing to spend money on, regardless of what sort of accounting mechanism we want to use to allocate that money or make that money. It’s not about the money itself. It’s about what’s important to us, right? Is it important to us that people have health care in the United States, or is it important to us that we have all this sort of investment, speculative investment, in AI technology?
And ultimately, at the end of the day, this whole narrative is a way of avoiding having the conversation about what our priorities are and what our values are as a political economy, as a society, as neighborhoods, as neighbors, as co-workers. Adam to speak to your example of folks all working together in one workplace where you have a manager saying, don’t pool your tips, that doesn’t serve your best interests, when ultimately, really this is working against thousands and thousands of years of human history, which, again, are not based on competition, but are based on cooperation and mutual survival.
Adam: And for the record, like, every anthropologist who studies early human history, if we’re going to make essentialist arguments, which a lot of libertarians and neoliberals do, says that the only reason we exist as a species is because of cooperation. And Brian Fagan, who’s kind of the most famous anthropologist, he talks about early human history, roaming in packs of 60, 70, 80, 100, and he says, Go try to kill a woolly mammoth by yourself, like, see how easy that is. And you can’t. The real reason we were able to come down from the trees in the first place, because we were a cooperative, social species. Now we can again debate the implications of that, but this idea of the kind of individualistic hero is again a total modern creation, if we’re going to make those essentialist arguments. I mean, even that’s kind of hooey, right? So I always think that’s kind of a funny metaphor. Because I personally could take down a woolly mammoth, but I don’t think anyone else could.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: [Laughs] I think one thing that’s important to emphasize, too, is that the idea of survival of the fittest was an extrapolation that Sir Francis Galton was making of his cousin Charles Darwin’s work. Darwin has his own sort of problems with framing who deserves to survive. He was very anti-vaccine. For example, he thought that vaccinating people against cowpox was potentially going to result in largely less intelligent of a society, because cowpox was weeding out people that wouldn’t be strong enough to survive, and that’s part of his writing. But this idea of survival the fittest is not Darwin’s idea. This is a rich dilettante, Sir Francis Galton, who is committed to the ideological project of naturalizing class hierarchies within Britain, who is well known for, in his early career, creating a beauty map of the UK and classifying counties by how attractive and unattractive the women are, by walking around with this sort of notepad in his pocket and making subjective observations.
Adam: So he’s Mark Zuckerberg, in other words.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Yeah, essentially, he’s Mark Zuckerberg who read his cousin’s work and said, Oh, survival of the fittest. And that’s been attributed to Darwin, but it is not Darwin’s idea. This is a dilettante, kind of rich boy, gentleman scientist, who’s sitting around tinkering until he creates eugenics, which, again, is not his idea in a very sort of Muskian sense. This is not something that originates with Sir Francis Galton. Malthus, years before Galton, has very similar ideas. This is something that goes back, as I said, pre-history of the United States. These are ideas that have a long and storied history within human society.
And so when you tap into them, of course, it seems like common sense, because eugenics, which is even just so recent, right? We’re talking 1850s, when eugenics is sort of conceptualized. It’s not even popular until the early 1900s. That’s really recent history. But the idea that there are loafers and parasites and hucksters and people who are out here to steal things from society without earning their place, this is something that was implemented as a law in the UK after the Black Plague killed so many workers that suddenly workers and artisans had choice over who they worked for. They weren’t able to be compelled to work for anyone because there were fewer workers. And so the British aristocracy gets really upset about the fact that workers suddenly can say, You know what, I want to work for a better wage. I’m not going to make the tapestry for you because you suck and you’re an asshole and you won’t pay me a fair wage. I’m going to make the tapestry for someone else. And so they made it illegal to refuse work, and this is the beginning of the British Poor Laws, and this also is the beginning of a legal system that tries to sort between deserving and non-deserving welfare recipients.
Adam: And the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 because they were like, Oh, we’re going to cap your wages pre-pandemic. And they were like, wait, what? Like, half of the world died. No.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Exactly. And this is ultimately why, when we’re thinking about waste and burden arguments and where they pop up, it’s always important to look at it through the lens of labor coercion, labor discipline, what conditions we’re being forced to accept in the landscape of work, and what wages we’re sort of being forced to accept, and what conversation are we trying to be told to have, instead of, Why am I not being paid what I’m owed?
Nima: Well, you can see so many parallels, of course, between how labor was treated post plague in Europe, and, of course, what happened during the Covid-19 pandemic and how labor was treated there. I mean, it’s kind of the same thing. And so if there’s any power seized by workers, and especially in collectives working together, that is like the biggest threat, and therefore you have to come up with all these other either laws or narratives, or both, to kind of serve the power of capital and to decrease the power of labor.
But Beatrice, you’ve been mentoring the idea of scarcity a lot. And I think the kind of flip side in terminology would be abundance. And we know that this abundance message, the abundance framework, has been used and often weaponized by not the Elon Musks, but rather like the Democratic Party and a lot of DC consultant language, this idea of an abundance framework and. Yeah, I think on its face, it sounds absolutely wonderful, and it’s important. It’s the flip side of scarcity. That’s what we want. But what have you seen in terms of the messaging you’ve been talking about, kind of how language is used, the language of burden? How do you see the language of abundance being used and potentially misappropriated by a party that also doesn’t necessarily have people’s best interests in mind?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Well, I think it’s important to note that the language of waste and burden is a bipartisan project. When we’re talking about Reagan’s Welfare Queen, we also have to talk about the Clinton-era welfare reforms that happened in the mid ’90s. But what I think, again, is key here is regardless of the word that’s being used, whether it’s the kind of neoliberal rebrand of abundance or whether it’s the classic frame of austerity and scarcity, we’re avoiding talking about priorities as a way to talk about why people are not feeling secure in their lives and why insecurity exists and you can evoke abundance all you want, but if the priority at the end of the day is still about redistributing power and wealth upwards and privatization, then it’s not abundance for everyone, right? Abundance for who is the real question we have to be asking, and again, it’s a way of redirecting our attention away from the conversation about what we’re putting our effort and money and priority behind as a society and as a political economy. You can call it abundance, but if it’s really still about redistributing wealth upwards through privatizing social safety net supports, then it’s just scarcity by another name.
Adam: Yeah, I want to talk about the delusion that goes into this, and the kind of political narrative. Get to the nitty gritty, which is that the framework has buried in it an assumption, either explicit or implicit, often explicit, that the supposed savings right? This is sort of a term that the New York Times uses unironically and without quotes, the idea that DOGE is finding savings, which, again, I don’t know how this works exactly. I guess there’s a couch cushion, they look inside and they see money that is somehow going to be redirected to Joe Six-Pack. That’s the implication that, once we get rid of waste, that’s going to go to you, the taxpayer. And again, we’ve done a whole episode on the taxpayer. This is the rhetorical opposite, right? The sort of holiest of the holies. There’s the small business owner, the troops, and the taxpayer. The sort of most morally relevant agent in the society is the all, all holy, holy taxpayer, which is sort of a proxy version of the ways in which citizenship was determined in the early US. Right? You own land? Are you, sort of, do you have a stake? Are you important, or even in the UK at the time? And this idea that, like, the money is going to go to them. And again, no one’s explained this mechanism to me, and it just, it’s really kind of the ultimate chumpsville. Because even if you buy the framing, even if you buy the premise, it’s not like they’re going to fire 10,000 workers from the Health Department or the USDA or the National Park Service, and then money magically appears in your account, like you just won a big jackpot on DraftKings, like, it’s like the ultimate chumpsville. I mean, really, because all it’s doing is going to go to more tax cuts for the rich.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Or not even tax cuts for the rich, but it’s going to create markets out of the services that they’re discrediting by stripping parts from it. So much of what we talk about in Health Communism is the idea of privatization and enclosure, and how the case for privatization is often made, and the rhetoric of waste extends way beyond social spending to include labor laws, environmental regulations, workplace protections. And when capitalists complain about red tape, they’re really talking about removing barriers to unchecked corporate power, to unchecked wealth redistribution upwards. And the real function of the waste narrative is to justify austerity measures, to justify any reason to strip the state of its ability to regulate and redistribute wealth in any capacity. And this weakens workers, it strengthens capital. It makes public goods also ripe for privatization, because it’s not necessarily the same compelling argument to come out here and say, I want to get rid of Social Security and have a fully privatized pension system. I want to make it up to your boss whether or not you’ll have any sort of retirement pension, and not something that you’re automatically guaranteed by paying into the system.
Fixation for public waste is also never matched by a concern for corporate waste, even though corporate waste really just absolutely dwarfs the waste of public programs, quote-unquote. You know, any kind of legitimate fraud that can be found in both scale and consequence. So yes, there are instances of legitimate misuse of benefits programs. They’re incredibly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. And I think part of what this narrative does is it creates the justification for privatization, which does not benefit the average person at all. It simply takes more of our needs and creates markets out of them. And I think a good example of this right now in the Trump administration, and a place to watch is Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which I know CMS is not a super fun agency to pay attention to, right? But with Dr. Oz at the helm, someone who for years, has been a huge investor in the privatized arm of Medicare called Medicare Advantage. He is poised to help transition our largest public health insurance program to a fully privatized model. Medicare Advantage is known for delaying care, for denying claims, for implementing algorithmic systems in order to create administrative burdens, not for corporations, but for everyday people trying to use their insurance, for seniors, for disabled people, who again, are already living on a fixed income because our Social Security system is not this huge generous benefit, but something that runs on a model of scarcity itself.
So ultimately, the idea of the malingering framing is really compelling because it’s easier to think about fixing the problem of your insecurity through rooting out someone who’s abusing the system, because it allows us to continue to believe that the system is adequate to meet our needs. It’s a much more comforting idea to say the problem is other people, not the entire political economy itself, right? It makes the problem seem more personalized, more easy to tackle, and so ultimately, what people are being sold is a silver bullet, a snake oil miracle cure for American capitalism and its extractive impulses, that simply it’s about culling society, returning to only the earners getting what they’re due. And that really the problem is not the entire way that we’ve prioritized and set up the values of the society that we live in, but really about who is part of that society and who’s not.
Nima: Before we let you go. Beatrice, please let our listeners know, not only where they can find your work, Death Panel podcast and elsewhere, but what else you may have coming up on the horizon.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Well, Health Communism is actually coming out in paperback in July, so you should be able to pick up a less expensive copy of the book. We’re also working on a huge project right now looking at specifically how these narratives were instrumentalized throughout the ongoing Covid pandemic against worker power to the detriment and death of millions of people worldwide, and how, ultimately, the capitalists and political system that we live under has worsened the conditions of work and life for so many people through, essentially, kind of putting gas on the fire and accelerating the push to return to work in person, despite the reality of the public-health scenario at hand. It really tells us how we went from Make America Great Again to Make America Healthy Again, because you can’t tell that story without telling the story of labor discipline throughout the Covid pandemic.
Nima: Well, we will absolutely look out for that and hope to have you back on when that project is released. We’ve been speaking with Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the Death Panel podcast, which is about the political economy of health. She is also the co-author with Artie Vierkant of the book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, which was published by Verso Books in 2022 and comes out in paperback this summer. So if you don’t already have it, please do pre-order or, hey, pick up another copy for someone that you love. Beatrice, this has been so wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us again on Citations Needed.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton: Thank you so much. This has been such a blast. I love talking about waste, fraud, and abuse, and it’s so important to cut through the bullshit and talk about really what is at the heart of this conversation. So thank you guys for covering this.
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Adam: Yeah, it’s a theme that we beat to death in the show. But it’s about the ways in which bonds of solidarity are eroded with arbitrary and lizard-brain appeals to, whether it’s sexism, racism, whatever it is, kind of the ways of, sort of dividing the working class is not a very original insight, but it’s one worth repeating, because the waste and abuse framework, necessarily, is meant to cast the listener as a Randian hero, and the other, the sort of unnamed other, typically a racialized, gendered other, is seen as a moocher, and you are the hero of your narrative, and you wouldn’t mooch off the system. So we need to get rid of those that can rather than being in solidarity with people by default and viewing the people who take money from you as the wealthy or the rich or your boss, it’s always this kind of revolving door of mooching sinister racialized subgroups that are out to get you personally.
And I think a lot about the ways in which, I have a four year old. So we read books on nature a lot, and there was a section on why certain animals have stripes. So why does a tiger have stripes? It has stripes because it helps it blend into the grasslands of Central Africa and parts of Asia, and it’s orange and black and white. And you say, Well, why does a zebra have stripes? Well, what in nature is black and white? Basically nothing. A zebra has stripes because it blends into other zebras. And I think that as a people, we’re zebras, but we all think we’re tigers, right? Which are kind of lone hunters. That we can kind of go out on our own rather than blend in with each other and have power through solidarity. And I know that may seem bleak to people. They say, Oh, well, zebras are herd animals, and I want to be a tiger. I want to be on my own. It’s like,
Nima: I’m the alpha. People are taken away from my hard-earned kill.
Adam: Yeah, I keep coming back to that thought about, like everybody wants to be this lone, maverick wolf hunter on their own, and there’s so many forced systems in place, so much media, so much propaganda, everything from, again, kind of finance advice industry to the rise-and-grind guys we talk about that want to paint you as this roguish, brilliant, singular protagonist of reality, rather than someone who’s a part of a system and can achieve solidarity through building bonds with co-workers, through your neighbors, through others in your community, and the waste, fraud, and abuse framework exists solely to create another arbitrary division between you and the people for whom you should naturally Have solidarity. And it’s very effective at doing that.
Nima: It’s true. The hero’s journey story is really, really effective to promote, you know, the trope of individual responsibility, this kind of maverick idea. While I think a lot of hero’s journey stories are actually based on collaboration and based on solidarity, but the way that they are framed in our media and our politics, yeah, do just that, Adam. They atomize and they silo, they divide, right? Not to be hokey about it, but like there is a real divide-and-conquer piece here. And when we’re divided, we’re not united. And so the idea of this waste, fraud, abuse, everything’s a scandal. Everything is punching down. Everything has to do with firing more people and lowering wages and lowering regulation that all benefit the wealthiest of the wealthy, that privatize everything, that don’t talk about systems and don’t have any intention of improving systems or improving material benefits in people’s lives, right? The material effects of the waste, fraud, and abuse language and narrative turn into policies that literally kill people, whether they are making planes and helicopters crash in the sky over DC because there aren’t enough people working in the control tower, or taking away vital life saving services, because there’s this phony narrative that it’s wasteful, that it’s inefficient based on the kind of Muskian idea of what efficiency may be. So yeah, I mean, I think all of this is exactly as you said. It’s about breaking down solidarity and about focusing in the wrong place. It’s all a distraction to take us off the actual causes of people’s oppression and suffering,
Adam: Yeah, and it’s a thing a lot of disability activists have said over and over again, and it really shouldn’t come to this. You should care for humans, because you simply should care for other humans. But you are one car accident away from being waste. You are one cancer diagnosis from being a member of a surplus population. We are all a random accident or bad luck away from being waste. And so viewing yourself as on the good side of that dichotomy is extremely temporary. It is extremely ephemeral. And I think that’s kind of one of the things people need to drive home. And you hear this from a lot of people who have these kind of life-altering moments, they always say, I never thought it would be me. Well, let’s build a system where it shouldn’t matter that it’s you. It shouldn’t matter, that you only care when it happens to you. You build these systems in place to protect everybody and have solidarity with everybody. And so I think that’s kind of the really important take-home point that you may think your shits don’t stink, and you’re riding high and you’re doing well, and you’re closing the Baxter account and you have your two nice cars in the driveway. But again, I think we’re all more precarious than we think.
Nima: I think that’s exactly right, Adam, and to also find the hope and optimism in even things when they’re bleak, is part of this right? That’s the way that we avoid being that waste and that we retain our strength together. But that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded, so we are able to keep doing these shows because of the generous support of listeners like you.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. Our music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, April 23, 2025.
