Welcome to the Age of Trump, where no one has any idea what the policies of the President of the United States are, including the President of the United States. There has never before been a U.S. president whose stated goals were as simultaneously vague, preposterous, and contradictory. Nor has there ever been a president who has intermittently taken strong stances that were so directly at odds with his own party’s most fervent dogma and his own appointees. Nor has there been a president who was as completely uninterested in the basics of politics. It’s as though America is playing in the World Series with a manager who truly doesn’t care about baseball. What this adds up to is that there’s not a single person who knows exactly what the Trump administration is going to try to do. No one could be surprised if Trump suddenly announced that he wants NASA to send a team to colonize Neptune; that he’s going to lead the team; and that he’s signed a deal with China to personally make $3 billion for the reality show syndication rights. But while nothing is certain, some alarming things are more likely than others. The path the new administration hopes to take may be discernible in a 2016 report by the conservative Heritage Foundation. According to The Hill on Thursday, Trump transition staffers – including a vice president at Heritage’s grassroots arm Action for America – are using the Heritage document as the basis for Trump’s first proposed budget. The Trump transition staff did not respond to questions about whether they are in fact doing this, and understandably so — the Heritage plan treats social spending like Lizzie Borden treated her parents, axing $10.5 trillion, or 20 percent, from the $51.4 trillion that the Congressional Budget Office projects the federal government would otherwise spend over the next ten years. “Unprecedented” is simultaneously accurate and insufficient to describe the Heritage cuts. As Joel Friedman, vice president for federal fiscal policy at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, puts it: “No administration up to this point has ever bought into proposals this far-reaching. Even the George W. Bush administration was never proposing cuts of anywhere near this magnitude.” Ten-year cumulative federal spending and revenues (billions of dollars) CBO projections Heritage proposal Difference Social Security 12,580 11,883 -697 Medicare 8,016 6,353 -1,663 Medicaid & Other Mandatory 12,057 7,621 -4,436 Defense Discretionary 6,481 6,684 203 Non-Defense Discretionary 6,494 3,970 -2,524 Net Interest 5,759 4,413 -1,346 Total spending 51,388 40,924 -10,464 Total revenues 42,010 40,710 -1,300 Source: CBO: The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2016 to 2026; Heritage Foundation: A Blueprint for Balance: A Federal Budget for 2017

Compiled by: Ernie Tedeschi As seen above, $6.8 trillion in cuts – or 65 pecent of the total — would be extracted from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other non-discretionary spending, including all of the Affordable Care Act. In addition to sharply reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits for most people, the Heritage plan would raise the programs’ eligibility ages and then index them to longevity – thereby enshrining in law the concept that no matter how wealthy the U.S. becomes, regular people will never be permitted to work fewer years at the end of their lives. Heritage does not provide details about how exactly Medicaid and other mandatory spending would be whacked, but the cuts would be even heavier. While most Americans don’t know this until they need it, 65 percent of the elderly in nursing homes depend on Medicaid to pay their bills, and the program covers 45 percent of the country’s spending on nursing home care overall. Non-Medicaid mandatory spending includes income security for veterans, food stamps, and unemployment benefits. Non-defense discretionary spending would also be eviscerated. Heritage would slice expenditures on clean energy, environmental programs, and veterans’ health, as well as funding for the Departments of Commerce, Transportation, Justice, and State. The National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be totally eliminated. While all this is happening, one part of the government would see its budget protected and even increased: the Pentagon. But wait, there’s more: The Heritage plan gets more draconian as time goes by, so these numbers actually understate the size of spending cuts in the long term. The graph below shows by percentage how much each area of government would be reduced in Heritage’s 2026 budget in comparison to the CBO’s current projection for 2026. For instance, spending on non-defense discretionary spending would be cut almost in half.

If Mike Pence were president, we’d know that he’d be committed to passing as much of this agenda as possible. But with Trump, there’s simply no way to know what will happen. Trump has chosen many Republicans for key positions, especially Rep. Tom Price for Secretary of Health and Human Services and Rep. Mick Mulvaney for director of the Office of Management and Budget, who’ve spent their careers trying to dismantle Social Security and Medicare. And we know that Republicans are generally on board with the Heritage vision. In fact, today’s Republican Party is more ideologically extreme than it has been in the memory of almost all living Americans. Most importantly, it now rejects the post-World War II bipartisan consensus that the New Deal was a good thing. The Republicans’ long term plan is to roll it back as far as possible, ideally returning the U.S. to a time without Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, or much regulation of business. The fact that this kind of brutal capitalism in the past was accompanied by the rise of communism and fascism and two cataclysmic wars doesn’t seem to worry them. Still, one of the main things that distinguished Trump during his campaign is that he vociferously and repeatedly committed to protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid:

I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. Huckabee copied me. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2015