Despite the impression you might get from social media and cable news, there’s a lot more to the Trump Administration than the daily drama at the White House. In policy terms, the real action is taking place at other federal departments and agencies, where Trump’s Republican appointees are trying to enact the Party’s radical and regressive agenda.

This agenda has nothing to do with the economic nationalism and the pledges to defend the welfare state—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid—that Donald Trump campaigned on. It is, instead, the agenda of billionaires far more ideological than Trump, such as the Koch brothers, the Mercer family, and the Ricketts family, who want to limit the government’s role in areas ranging from the environment to labor relations to health care to financial regulation. As the historian Josh Zeitz pointed out in a piece for Politico a couple of months ago, the ultimate aim of this agenda is to roll back not merely the regulatory reforms of Barack Obama but the entire Great Society vision of Lyndon Johnson.

On Thursday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., issued new guidelines that will allow individual states to impose work requirements on recipients of Medicaid, the federal program that provides health-care coverage to poor people. Since 1965, when the Johnson Administration created Medicaid, the only requirement for enrolling in the program has been eligibility based on income. Now, under the new guidelines, states will be able to deny Medicaid to otherwise eligible people who fail to meet the new work requirements.

The Medicaid announcement came a day after the Wall Street Journal reported that the Treasury Department is on the verge of relaxing federal rules that oblige banks to lend in poor neighborhoods. Democrats and housing activists have claimed that such changes could lead to the return of “redlining”—a banking practice that for decades denied mortgage financing to minority neighborhoods. Some banking experts said that the changes being considered wouldn’t go that far, but that they could reduce the incentives for banks to make loans, particularly mortgage loans, in poor neighborhoods.

Both of these potential changes—to Medicaid and to bank rules—are the work of Trump appointees who have been preparing the ground for months. Seema Verma, the head of C.M.S., is a health-policy consultant from Indiana with close ties to Vice-President Mike Pence, her state’s former governor. Before joining the Trump Administration, she helped design Indiana’s controversial Medicaid expansion program under the Affordable Care Act, which forced Medicaid recipients to make monthly payments. The Indiana plan didn’t include work requirements, but that was only because Verma and Pence knew that the Obama Administration wouldn’t have allowed them.

On her first day at C.M.S., Verma urged other states to follow Indiana’s lead in imposing Medicaid charges, and she also hinted that the Trump Administration would approve of new work requirements. On Thursday, Verma followed through on that hint, saying that C.M.S. would support “state demonstrations that require eligible adult beneficiaries to engage in work or community engagement activities (e.g., skills training, education, job search, caregiving, volunteer service).”

Verma claimed that the changes were motivated by a desire to improve the health and well-being of able-bodied Medicaid recipients—that the Administration was only encouraging these people to join the labor force. But, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than half of all non-disabled adult Medicaid recipients already work, and about eight in ten of them live in households in which at least one family member works. What about the minority who don’t work? Thirty-six per cent of them said that they were ill or disabled; thirty per cent identified themselves as caregivers; fifteen per cent said that they were students; and nine per cent said that they were retired.

Since the new guidelines contain exceptions for the disabled, students, and caregivers, the new guidelines shouldn’t—in theory—affect these groups. But what matters is how the rules are applied, not just what they say. A lot of Medicaid recipients are poor, sick, or marginalized people who don’t interact well with government bureaucracies. To maintain their health coverage in states affected by the new guidelines, they will have to obtain a doctor’s letter or prove that they have been working or studying for a certain number of hours a week. And, in many places, they will also have to pay premiums. “There are . . . countless studies showing that charging premiums to people with very low incomes will result in them not being able to pay and losing coverage,” Leonardo Cuello, the director of health policy at the National Health Law Program, told TPM. “So that’s not an experiment.”

The changes to the banking rules are being pushed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a former colleague of his from Wall Street, Joseph Otting, the head of the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mnuchin and Otting are working on a “major revision” to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which Congress passed to address decades of discrimination in bank lending, particularly mortgage lending. Rather than simply outlawing discriminatory practices, such as redlining, the C.R.A. charged the regulatory agencies with making sure that banks complied with a new set of rules.

Many of the reforms Mnuchin and Otting are preparing “could make it easier for banks to meet certain lending requirements and lower penalties for compliance problems,” the Journal story said. The system the government uses to grade banks’ performance could be changed. And the definition of community-development lending could be expanded to include loans to businesses and infrastructure projects that don’t solely serve the poor.

To be sure, neither Medicaid nor the C.R.A. is perfect. In a more benign political environment, it might be possible to view one or both of these new initiatives as well-meaning reform efforts. But, with respect to regulations, there is little benign about the Trump Administration, where deference to business interests and suspicion of the poor and their representatives go hand in hand.

For decades now, the American Bankers Association and other financial lobbying groups have been demanding relief from the C.R.A. In Mnuchin and Otting, they have found two sympathetic listeners. Medicaid has long been a target for conservative Republicans: if their efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act had succeeded last year, the Party would have rolled back an expansion of the program that has enabled an additional fifteen million Americans of modest means to obtain health insurance.

Despite failing in that effort, Republicans continue to stigmatize Medicaid recipients as spongers who take advantage of the system. “I think there are certainly cases where that happens,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said during one of her daily briefings last week. “We don’t think that’s the overwhelming majority, but certainly that’s an issue, and something we want to be able to address.”

It’s the same Republican playbook from which the recently passed tax bill was taken: favors for rich and powerful interest groups, cuts and opprobrium for the poor. No wonder G.O.P. leaders are so reluctant to criticize Trump. As I’ve noted many times before, he’s giving them what they want.