Paul Ryan has called for the consolidation of more than a dozen federal anti-poverty programs into a single “opportunity grant” to the states.

Policy design can be used as a powerful signal to key voting blocs. Politicians and bureaucrats construct these policies not only on the basis of strong or weak constituencies, but also in relation to “value-laden, emotional, and powerful positive and negative social constructions with which they are associated,” according to Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram of Arizona State University. Political leaders, they argue, “like to do ‘good’ things for ‘good’ people, and also like to be ‘tough’ on ‘bad’ people.”

As a rule, policies like these sell.

For example, in 1996 Bill Clinton — after running on a “rights and responsibilities” platform — signaled his courtship of the white working class by promising to “end welfare as we know it.” His legislation that year, as the Yale Law and Policy Review succinctly puts it,

ended the country’s only cash entitlement program for poor families with children, replacing it with a fixed-budget, state-administered program that offers lifetime-limited cash assistance to some but not all needy families and requires recipients to participate in work activity as a condition of receipt.

That law is a case study in the effort to take benefits away from the supposedly undeserving poor. With the passage of his Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, Clinton became the first two-term elected Democrat to serve in the White House since Franklin Roosevelt.

Fiscal conservatism can use policy design to force retrenchment that favors white voters over minority voters. Changes like these are frequently masked in bureaucratic language.

Budgetary mechanisms are one way of “paring at the margins.” With his selection of Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina — a founding member of the Freedom Caucus — as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump demonstrated his willingness to wield the budget for political purposes.

Mulvaney won his congressional seat as part of the 2010 Tea Party sweep. The first bill he sponsored was the Cut, Cap and Balance Act of 2011, a measure designed to force reductions in means-tested programs for the poor.

In the realm of social spending, Trump has positioned himself on the side of fiscal conservatives. On infrastructure, however, he and Bannon, who just lost his seat on the National Security Council, are on a different track. They are pledged to an immense public works agenda generating jobs that would be appealing and available to white and nonwhite working class voters — hard-core budget hawks be damned.