Publishing two different newspapers, in two very different communities, has given me a fascinating perspective on how damaging, widespread and downright cruel the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts have been.
Three pieces in this issue, all written by our managing editor, Kris Vagner, illustrate this—especially the cruelty.
Our cover story examines the devastating cuts regarding that most basic of human needs: food. The nation’s food banks—including the Food Bank of Northern Nevada and its affiliate food-distribution outlets locally—are dealing with the consequences of a sudden and unexplained cancellation of $500 million in food shipments from the federal government, as well as other cuts.
“We were looking to receive some loads (of food) between April and August,” said Jocelyn Lantrip, the group’s marketing and communications director. “We had them on order already, and those were specifically protein, dairy and eggs. And there was a little over 350,000 pounds of food, several loads, that were on order. That has been officially canceled.”
These cuts are coming at a time of peak demand. Jocelyn Lantrip told Kris: “We’re seeing very high numbers of people needing food assistance—higher than we’ve ever seen. The thing that we hear the most is that the cost of living is too high for income.”
Cruel.
Kris also delves into the haphazard and on-again, off-again cuts made to the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.
“The Trump administration cut tens of thousands of jobs across the federal government in February, and reinstated many of them in March,” Kris writes. “On April 18, a federal judge ordered the administration to concede in writing that the reason it gave to 17,000 probationary workers for their terminations—their performance—was ‘a total sham.’”
This, too, is cruel—and the cruelty is heightened by the fact that nobody can get any real answers about what’s going on. A government employee with expertise in land management, who asked not to be named, told Kris: “I think we’re all on that same boat of not being able to find hard numbers on how many people have been fired.”
These are public lands. Aren’t we owed answers about what’s happening with them?
Finally, in her Editor’s Note, Kris delves into the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the arts—again, sudden and unexplained. In one fell swoop, Nevada Humanities lost 75 percent of its annual budget.
Kris notes that arts events and related spending, like dining out before a show, “generated $156 million in Nevada in local, state and federal tax revenue in 2022, according to a study by Americans for the Arts—not bad when compared to the $2 million-plus that has been allocated to our state’s two major arts agencies in recent years.”
Not only are these cuts economically harmful; they hurt people. “The arts industry actually puts a lot of food on a lot of tables in this state,” Kris noted.
Let’s put aside the various policy arguments in play here. Even if you believe our government is bloated, and that spending needs to be cut, that can be done without cancelling shipments to food banks without explanation or warning. Even if you believe employees need to be laid off, that can be done rationally, with compassion and explanation.
No matter where you stand politically, you can’t rationally deny that the Trump administration’s actions have been haphazard, needlessly unexplained, and terribly cruel.
And if you’re OK with that, you can neither call yourself humane, nor Christian, nor moral. You’re just someone who doesn’t give a damn about your fellow humans.