Democrats Need A New Message
It's got to be about the beneficiaries, not the bureaucrats.
I am not happy about what’s happening in Washington right now. As I’ve said multiple times now, hacking up our federal government too quickly without proper reverence for the democratic process is dangerous and threatens the vulnerable.
Democrats aren’t fighting back adequately. They don’t have a cadre of youthful leaders who are making fiery speeches on the steps of the Capitol or gathering a huge following on social media. Trump and Musk aren’t checked by anyone with the equivalent strength and reach.
Oddly, Congress, as an institution, is letting this happen, too. Theoretically, Congress, an autonomous branch of government, should be protecting its turf and resisting this unprecedented power grab by the president and his unelected pals. But that’s not happening either. So, Trump and DOGE are bulldozing through American Government and International Relations with Blitzkrieg speed and Ketamine-fueled randomness.
Will the judiciary get involved? What happens if a president completely ignores a judicial order? No clue. We’re in new territory here, folks.
Democrats need to slow down these changes and force Trump to go through the proper democratic channels. To create a strong counter-movement with strong public support, they need the right message. The message should focus on the issues of the beneficiaries, not the bureaucrats. We need our government to protect vulnerable people.
Democrats Need a New Message
Democrats seem stuck on the job losses, but outside of DC, people aren't tied to the federal government for employment. They don’t have neighbors and drinking buddies who are suddenly out of work. So, government downsizing is a remote issue for most of America.
Don’t get me wrong, losing your job, having bills to pay, and possibly needing to relocate your family is horrible. But that happens to people every day in the private sector, so the average American isn’t sympathetic about strangers across the country losing their jobs.
Maybe Americans will care more about the loss of government jobs when they come closer to home. The cuts in research funding, for example, will have downstream effects on colleges and hospitals around the country. If DOGE cuts go beyond staffing and start to impact actual funding to children with special education, then people will be super mad. However, that hasn’t happened yet. The pain seems concentrated in the DC area, where real estate prices have dropped by twenty percent.
I wish that the public would be upset by the DOGE process because of democracy and all that, but that’s too abstract for most folks. With the Chinese government poking around our cellphones via TikTok, folks don’t care that much about DOGE’s access to private data. To get people to care, the message should focus on stories about the real folks who receive Medicaid, Social Security, free lunches, and special education.
Democrats need to spell out exactly how DOGE cuts will hurt poor kids, disabled kids, young people on reservations, children in homeless shelters, or disabled adults in special housing. They need to hire staff that can quickly get them up to speed on the inner workings of programs like Medicaid and special education. They should propose reforms to ensure that government money gets to those individuals as cleanly as possible, with the fewest number of hurdles and intermediaries.
With the right people coaching them, Democratic leaders could talk about real kids who need more help with reading and math. They could talk about the dystopian lives of families of highly disabled kids. They could talk about how poverty erodes a person’s mental health. They could point to women juggling low-wage labor, trips to the food shelter, and childcare. We need government to maintain these programs to protect our vulnerable citizens.
Vulnerable People Need the Federal Government
Trump says that government functions, like schools, should be returned to the states. Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for the head of the Department of Education, blamed the federal government for the poor test scores in the states.
I’m sure that both Trump and McMahon are perfectly aware that states are responsible for poor test scores. State legislatures are responsible for closing schools for a year and a half. They choose books for the history class. They write the standardized tests. The DOE got other things wrong, but they can’t be blamed for low test scores.
Despite the MAGA talk points, education policy is a local function in our country. But it shouldn’t be. Local schools don’t make sense anymore.
There are 546 school districts in my state of New Jersey. Each locality put its spin on state laws. They set salaries. They are overseen by school boards that make decisions to empty rooms without input from members of the public or oversight by local media.
At the very least, we need regional school districts in my state. It would reduce administrative redundancy. It would improve special education because it would be easier to create classrooms of students with similar abilities. A national education system would create even more equality across all schools and students.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to create regional schools or give the feds more power to increase equity. Property values are tied to school quality. Also, local leaders cling to their control over schools, the police department, and the fire department. Maybe we should let DOGE take a look at state and local government.
The Problem: Credibility
Although the federal government doesn’t have too much control over the day-to-day business in schools, it does manage several programs that support vulnerable people, including low-income kids, disabled kids, disabled adults, and more. DOGE is currently examining the necessity of workers running those federal programs.
My day job is supporting those people. As I wrote last week, those families are very worried that programs for children and young adults will be cut. At the same time, these parents will tell you how badly those programs are run.
Special education is a disaster. I attended IEP meetings for 18 years. I have four storage boxes of paperwork from those meetings stored in the basement. To understand all the laws, I read books, spent years in parent-school meetings, and attended a 10-week $900 class. I still don't understand everything about IDEA. I talked more about how special education should be reformed on Twitter.
Getting government help for disabled adults is a three-year ordeal. Parents hire me to get them through the system. I did a one-hour free webinar that just scratched the surface of the Kafkaesque system. Only the rich and highly educated get help.
Others are mad about how the federal government botched the 2024 FAFSA rollout so that 432,000 low-income students didn’t apply for Pell Grants last year. Others haven’t forgotten about being abandoned during the COVID shutdowns and the missing $190 billion in education relief money. With only 30 percent of students able to adequately read and write, there’s a lot to be mad about.
Although the beneficiaries are scared, they have no fondness for the people running these programs. Have you ever talked to the parents of middle school students with dyslexia or the parents of 19-year-olds with autism? They’re mad. They won’t fight for the people running those programs.
With those high-profile screw-ups, the defenders of the federal government face a credibility problem.
Solutions
I would love to see a leader with some street cred on these issues, someone like Senator Hassan of New Hampshire, come forward and defend the beneficiaries of these federal programs. Democrats admit past problems and commit to making systems work better. Americans should hear the stories from folks on the ground and push the boys of DOGE to make public statements about protecting those groups.
And then Congress needs to stop cowering in the corner and do what it’s supposed to do — check the executive branch.
This post is riddled with poor messaging and bad statistics. One thing I'll start with - most federal employees are not located in Washington DC: only a fifth reside in the DMV. That means that 80% are distributed throughout the United States. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/#are-most-federal-workers-in-the-washington-d-c-area. The post about real estate values in the DMV also does not cite any sound data. I appreciate your opinion, but no longer find your postings valuable as they are clearly not fully baked or backed up with data.