Josh Pacewicz is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Brown University. His research examines the creation of the American state and subnational governance, particularly the relationship between federal policy and party politics. His pieces on the Obama campaign and Donald Trump have appeared in popular outlets like the Washington Post. In addition to his editorial work, he is the author of Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the post-Keynesian Society, a street-level account of politics in two small Rust Belt cities. Through showing how traditional conceptions of political parties and geographic divisions are far too simple, he delivers a comprehensive analysis of American politics as it happens on the ground and applies a similar approach to understanding the complexities and impacts of federal programs.
Ciara Leonard: You’re currently teaching a class on social services and welfare policy, and also have done work in the municipal finance area. What made you initially interested in that area of research?
Josh Pacewicz: I’m interested in how politics works. The American political system is pretty complicated. A lot of policies are delivered at the subnational level, either by states or local governments. So insofar as I’m interested in political stuff, it’s natural to examine or be interested in those things.
CL: A common misconception is that social services and welfare are strictly administered at the federal level, but individual states are sometimes put in charge of administering federal programs. How exactly are these services manifested at the state-level?
JP: Different programs work in different ways. The United States has one program that’s entirely federally administered, that’s Social Security. Then there are some programs that are administered by states. That would be Medicaid, where each state effectively runs its own Medicaid program, and then gets reimbursed for Medicaid-eligible expenses by the federal government. Then, some programs are delegated to for-profit companies, like Medicare. But there’s a lot of policies that just rely on a kind of intergovernmental regulation or different kinds of grants and transfers. Education would be an example of that.
CL: Given that programs are sometimes divided by state, are there any examples of how partisan politics can affect the carrying out of a federal program? Have there ever been any discrepancies or tension between federal and state governments?
JP: In a couple different ways. A lot of delegated programs basically only work if the state spends money first. If the state doesn’t spend the money, there’s no federal program. In recent politics, the front page news example would be the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expansion that directed states to expand their Medicaid programs to all adults under a certain income threshold. A bunch of states’ attorney generals sued the federal government over that, and the court essentially said states cannot be forced to take the ACA expansion. As a result, some states have not expanded Medicaid to people who are low income.
In addition to that, Medicaid allows states to apply for waivers, which allows them to do extra stuff not in the Medicaid statutes. For instance, getting help living at home as opposed to going to a nursing home. Anything you can imagine that’s related to social services is potentially eligible for Medicaid, but your state has to apply for a waiver. And some states have applied for a lot more waivers than other states. States can also just make it really hard to get programs even if you’re legally entitled to them. For example, they won’t hire enough people to answer the phone, or an application will require a lot of unnecessary documentation. Essentially, they can do a lot to make it hard to access the program even if you’re nominally eligible for it.
CL: Recently there have been reports of the pressure being placed onto Social Security to reduce its staff. What would happen if a massive cut like that happens to a federal program?
JP: The cuts that the Trump Administration has done, for the most part, haven’t touched Medicare and Medicaid or Social Security. It’s more that Republicans have some bills on the table that would make alterations. It’s possible that Social Security will be impacted because if they lower taxes too much or if there’s a recession, then the amount of money going into Social Security will eventually not be enough to pay benefits. That would trigger an automatic cut in the program, but I don’t think that they have any plans to attack Social Security. I think Medicare is the same. I don’t think there’s any plan on the table to cut Medicare. There are, however, various plans on the table to establish a cap for reimbursement to states. States that have very expensive Medicaid programs would not get reimbursed fully; currently, any spending on low income adults is reimbursed at 90 percent by the federal government. They essentially want to roll that reimbursement rate down.
What the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the administration have been more focused on is cutting the federal workforce around the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Education. Those workers are mostly in Washington DC, overseeing regulation. A likely consequence of that would be regulation gets a lot worse—like tax cheating would get worse because there’s not enough IRS agents to audit people. With the Department of Education, they have essentially successfully administratively eliminated public student loan forgiveness for teachers and other employees by shutting down portals. They are also trying to eliminate funding for special education and programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those are the cuts, and then there’s a parallel strategy of using the Justice Department to sue states, nonprofits, and local school districts over stuff they dislike. That’s what recent attacks on universities are—through accusing Columbia University of violating the Civil Rights Act, the government can try to take away their funding.
CL: A lot of the rhetoric surrounding downsizing and promoting efficiency has used the word “bloated.” What do you think of that word choice, and do you have any thoughts on why the government would be applying it like that?
JP: They’re trying to paint the federal bureaucracy as out of control and large, which is ironic because the federal bureaucracy really isn’t that large, especially for a country our size. It’s actually quite small. It used to be that Republicans would advocate for more administrative control and less court control until quite recently. Under Reagan, the famous Chevron Doctrine was established in the 1980s. The Republicans frequently used it to say that the technical questions regarding program administration should be up to federal administrative agencies rather than the courts. That’s gotten repealed in recent times to essentially give the courts a lot more exercise. With the gradual cultivation of legal talent and training of people like Amy Coney Barrett, who is conservative and recognized as an elite jurist, conservatives were able to take over the previously liberal-controlled courts in the 1990s and the 2000s. Now that conservatives have gotten to be dominant in fields such as the courts, the administrative state is really the only thing holding them back.
CL: With what you’re saying about the courts, Congress, and programs delegated to states, it’s clear there’s many moving parts at play. The recent federal staffing cuts have been described as “scream tests”—the removal of different positions and agencies and seeing what backfires, or “screams,” as a result. I am curious about the implications of such sporadic reductions in force. If these scream tests continue happening, what do you think are the organizational or regulatory consequences?
JP: The consequences would depend a lot on the policy area. Business regulation will be troubling just because there’s a lot of concentration of wealth and a few companies and good evidence of collusion, especially around prices. If we have no anti-monopoly enforcement, that’s concerning. Two companies can collude to drive up, say, the price of eggs—and then what are we supposed to do? In terms of social services, it’s really hard to know what will break based on firing federal employees just because they’re responsible for so much. It seems they’ve been really focused on attacking universities this time around, which I find surprising.
CL: Do you have any hypotheses on why they are attacking education in particular, especially the recent threats to cut funding for higher education?
JP: Probably because it’s politically popular. Regular people distrust and dislike higher education for good reasons. But you could make an argument that they’re trying to go after potential critics before they do something else. It’s possible they don’t want protests on campus. There’s also a sense in which Republicans, especially elite Republicans, would really like to send their kids to Ivy League institutions, but want said institutions to be more ideologically aligned with them.
CL: You mentioned earlier about how services such as Social Security and Medicare probably won’t be touched due to their sheer social and economic value. Vivek Ramaswamy, up until recently, was one of the DOGE leaders. During his previous presidential campaign, a part of his platform was privatizing Social Security. While that doesn’t have too much to do with DOGE explicitly, it seems to relate to a broader governance goal for Republicans. Do you think there’s a world where DOGE or somebody else will urge Trump to put privatization on the table?
JP: Never say never. There’s a lot of stuff that’s happened that I would have thought really unlikely even a month ago with Social Security. But it’s hard to imagine how that would work. If you think about it, there’s a bunch of people over 65 that when they retire, they’ll draw Social Security benefits. Any person in America, unless they’re wildly independently wealthy, is very dependent on this program. That’s how they pay rent or their mortgage or buy Christmas presents for their grandkids. That’s the case in Republican areas and Democratic areas. Everybody’s basically counting on this program. Without it, they suddenly are poor. You know, who votes? Old people vote. So I think there’s just an extreme constituency for defending the program. Likewise with Medicare. That’s where old people in America’s insurance comes from. If they didn’t have Medicare, they would have to purchase it on the open marketplace. They would have to go to an insurance company and get a private policy. And that insurance company would definitely charge them an arm and a leg.
There’s a pot of money that Social Security and Medicare are paid for. If you stop replenishing the pot, it would drain pretty fast. The pot is shrinking, but it’s shrinking really slowly, since there’s almost as much coming in as coming out. If there is no money coming in, the pot would drain in like a year or two. If you’re talking about privatizing Social Security, younger people, instead of paying into the pot that’s being paid out to current old people, would have the option of buying stocks and bonds with Social Security money instead. So instead of money going to the pot, mutual funds would be bought, which could be a good deal for those buyers. But then what happens to the people receiving it now? That would be the problem.
CL: You mentioned being surprised about the speed in which things are changing even within the past few months. Over your time and research in this area across various electoral cycles, how have you seen these subjects or services change? Has there been any sort of trajectory you’ve noticed, or has it always been a rapid sort of fluctuation comparable to what we’ve witnessed these past few months?
JP: It’s possible that the Trump administration will change the big social programs—that would be Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They might cut them, or they might just do cosmetic adjustments around the edges. In terms of some of their other actions, they are breaking tradition in a lot of ways. They are trying to undo what liberals accomplished in the 60s and 70s. And from what I can see, they’ll probably succeed. Essentially, liberalism in the 60s and 70s used the courts to enforce our version of equality and civil rights. The Republicans now have their own agenda, which is basically their own interpretation of the Civil Rights Act—that white people are the people who are truly discriminated against.
They are policing institutions to roll back those gains. And it seems like they’re succeeding. There’s a tendency in the second Trump administration to disregard court orders, which is completely new. Even in the first Trump administration, if the courts expressed the administration was unable to do something, they generally accepted it and tried a different strategy. But with the new administration, the courts have told DOGE they cannot do something, and they keep doing it anyway. Continuing to disregard the courts and then simultaneously and ironically advancing a new legal theory of discrimination to transform society—those would be the radical breaks that have not been seen before.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.