In the US, dismissing the poor as undeserving failures has been almost a national sport. It began back in the 1980s, after Ronald Reagan’s ardent anti-welfare presidency, which had the dubious distinction of cultivating the myth of the so-called welfare queen. Now a fresh and frightening attack on millions of low income people is under way.

While (forgivably) observers are distracted daily by the tumultuous Trump White House, the Republican budget plan for 2018 – currently in the House of Representatives – is set to eviscerate what little is left of America’s social safety net.

Proposed budgets are inevitably altered as they make their way through convoluted congressional processes but advocacy groups are warning that, if implemented, 2018’s House Republican budget would represent the apotheosis of decades of attacks on poor people.

The list of areas at risk of being slashed is long and disturbing. It includes affordable housing schemes, women’s health, jobs training and disability benefits. It also targets one of the most fundamental forms of assistance for those in urgent need – nutrition-based programmes.

As the Illinois-based Shriver Centre points out, programmes such as the supplemental nutrition assistance programme (Snap) – formerly food stamps, which are targeted for a whopping 20% cut over a decade – and earned income tax credits (also on the chopping block) are the mainstays of a safety net helping millions of families annually. Yet they are directly in the firing line. These programmes don’t just help to alleviate the immediate need that sends people to food banks. The Shriver Centre points out that the evidence shows they lead to “long term gains” that promote social mobility.

More than 40 million Americans use food banks, about one in eight people, and this includes 13 million children. In large part, this reliance on food banks is because Snap and other programmes have never been sufficient. Scott Allard, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution in Washington and author of the new book Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty, says the notion advocated by Donald Trump and Republican politicians that the slack from more cuts to federal anti-poverty programmes would be picked up by private charities and food banks is “not a reality”.

Allard argues that if cuts go ahead there will be “irreparable harm to a safety net that already struggles to meet the needs of working poor families”.

The House budget is couched in well-worn and extremely effective rhetoric not dissimilar to the Tories at Westminster, namely that the culprit is “excessive spending” by previous governments, when what it actually means is a cold-hearted culling of welfare initiatives that help the poorest. And, as the Centre for American Progress makes clear, what it really constitutes is a shameless “Trojan horse” that would cut taxes for the rich “on the backs of working families”.

When austerity was in its infancy in the UK a few years ago and I made my first visit to food banks around the country, the people queueing for help expressed a common anxiety: that this might become the “new normal”. Everyone hoped it wouldn’t yet here we are, in the summer of 2017, and food banks are now ubiquitous. Legions of citizens, including tens of thousands of children, now rely on these stopgap facilities to meet basic nutritional needs. And a recent report alarmingly predicts that their use is likely to rise with the impact of policies such as benefit freezes and the roll out of universal credit. To see how this has happened we need only to look across the Atlantic.

The UK’s journey down the road of dismantling its welfare state and blaming the needy follows closely in the footsteps of the American system and the narrative that has shaped it. While the richest are awarded lavish tax cuts, millions of people are rendered desperate and destitute, and inequality is cemented. This is indeed the “new normal”.

• Mary O’Hara is an award-winning columnist and author of Austerity Bites