In the rush to “dismantle the administrative state,” some insist that freeing people from “burdensome bureaucracy” will unleash thriving. Will it? Let’s look together.
A century ago, bureaucracy was minimal. The 1920s followed a worldwide pandemic that killed an estimated 17.4–50 million people. While the virus spread, the Great War raged; we can still picture the dehumanizing use of mustard gas and trench warfare. When the war ended, the Roaring Twenties erupted as an antidote to grief. Despite Prohibition, life was a party—until the crash of 1929. The 1930s opened with a global depression, record joblessness, homelessness, and hunger. Despair spread faster than the pandemic had.
This was the context when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933. The nation was demoralized by nonresponsiveness, corruption, and rot. Over the next decade, FDR passed a series of policies that made up the New Deal for American workers. He reset our measure of success from “take what you can hold” to “a chicken in every pot.” Large public projects put people to work. Pride in earning a living, providing for families, and building together helped heal. These common efforts—Hoover Dam, CCC reforestation, rural electrification—are reminders of what’s possible. They still belong to us, the people. FDR fought with industrialists and their politicians to level the playing field for working Americans.
Before FDR, Presidents Warren G. Harding (1921–23) and Calvin Coolidge (1923–29) championed a “small government, pro-business” creed—lower taxes and regulations, high tariffs, and a hands-off posture toward corporate power. Their era also carried the stain of major scandals like Teapot Dome. With that context, today’s moves—tariffs, shrinking federal capacity, pressuring the Fed, and a fog of favoritism—feel like a remix of the 1920s playbook. So what do we do about this?
The 1920s → 2020s: the rhyme we can’t ignore
A century ago, America flirted with minimal federal guardrails just as new risks were exploding. The decade glittered—right up to the cliff’s edge. Today, we’re repeating patterns that predict more suffering and earlier deaths, especially for kids, elders, and low-income families.
- Public health pullback. The 1920s briefly invested in maternal and infant health (Sheppard–Towner) and then let it die in 1929—exactly when families needed it. Today, cuts or rollbacks to public-health capacity (disease surveillance, vaccination programs, mental-health lifelines) send the same message: you’re on your own. We know how that story ends—avoidable deaths that land heaviest on those with the fewest resources.
- Environmental non-protection. In the 1920s, national air and water protections didn’t exist. Industrial growth came with a hidden casket count: heart and lung disease from soot, chemical exposures, poisoned rivers. Now, attempts to weaken pollution standards, methane controls, conservation rules, and climate resilience push us back toward that pre-regulatory baseline—just as heat waves and wildfire smoke intensify.
- Labor and child safety were viewed as “cost centers.” Before modern labor law, workplaces were more lethal and kids worked dangerous jobs. Loosening enforcement today or expanding hazardous youth work echoes those risks—and robs children of schooling that lengthens lifetime health and earnings.
- Breadlines without safety nets. The 1920s offered little protection when incomes collapsed. Today, proposals to shrink SNAP, Medicaid, and IRS capacity (which delivers the EITC and Child Tax Credit) weaken the very programs proven to improve birth outcomes, reduce medical debt, and stabilize families.
- Moral panics, real violence. Then, Prohibition and nativist politics. Now, defunding community violence-intervention and loosening restrictions to carry weapons even as political temperature spikes. Then as now: when prevention capacity is stripped, the funeral homes get busier.
The throughline is simple: when we dismantle the basic public functions that make freedom real—health, safety, fair rules—life expectancy falls. There’s nothing “pro-life” about that.
What breaks the cycle: a practical bargain for longer, better lives
The good news is we’ve learned a lot since the 1920s. We know which policies lengthen lives and expand opportunity at the same time. The Grand Bargain Project (GBP) doesn’t sell a silver bullet; it offers a package that stacks life-extending, prosperity-building reforms across six areas. Here’s how that package counters today’s risks:
Greater economic opportunity & growth.
Health is a growth strategy. Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and childcare access, investing in rural and low-income urban entrepreneurship, and cutting red tape for affordable housing all boost labor participation and family stability—while reducing the conditions that drive early death. Community-college upskilling tied to fast-growing sectors turns dead-end jobs into ladders.
Schools that enable kids to reach their potential.
Title I support, school meals, broadband, and evidence-based teacher development improve achievement now and adult health later. Accountability paired with resources—not austerity—closes gaps. Kids who learn and eat well today become adults who live longer tomorrow.
Effective & affordable healthcare.
Pay for outcomes, not volume. Expand community health support in rural and distressed places. Protect reproductive care and maternal health. Strengthen Accountable Care Organizations and negotiate drug prices. These are cost-cutting, life-saving levers that avoid the false choice between health and budgets.
Spending efficiently to lower the national debt.
Prevention is cheaper than the ICU. Clean air, violence interruption, nutrition, and early care reduce downstream costs. Modernizing revenue collection (yes, a capable IRS) ensures everyone pays what they owe so we don’t starve the very programs that save lives and money.
Dependable, clean & affordable energy.
A predictable carbon price with rebates for low-income and rural families, plus streamlined transmission, accelerates cleaner air and lowers bills. Pair it with methane abatement and conservation and you get fewer asthma attacks, heart crises, and heat-related deaths—measurable gains in life expectancy.
A fairer, simpler tax code.
Simplify. Broaden the base. Cut the carve-outs that reward tax gymnastics over real productivity. Align business incentives with investment and wages. Protect pro-health credits like the EITC with reliable administration. That’s how we fund the basics without sandbagging growth.
“Are they trying to kill us?” Or are we going to save each other?
If you look only at the headlines—cuts to the very systems that keep people alive—it’s easy to conclude that yes, some leaders are comfortable with sicker, shorter-lived Americans as long as their faction is satisfied. But we are not condemned to replay the 1920s. The New Deal wasn’t magic; it was mobilization. People demanded a better deal and then showed up—on job sites, in union halls, at ballot boxes.
The Grand Bargain approach is how we show up now. It’s not a culture-war victory lap. It’s a coalition of neighbors who want to live longer, spend less on preventable tragedy, and hand our kids a future that’s cleaner, saner, and fairer. People from left, right, and center are choosing a package they prefer to the status quo, even when it includes trade-offs. That’s how big changes happen: together, with enough trust to trade.
A century ago, we chose practical solutions over posturing. We can do that again—cleaner air, safer communities, better schools, fairer taxes, and lower debt. But it only happens if enough of us lean in and choose a deal we can live with—and live longer because of.
Yes, They Are Trying To Kill Us was first published on Debilyn Molineaux's substack platform and was republished with permission.
Debilyn Molineaux is a storyteller, collaborator & connector. For 20 years, she led cross-partisan organizations. She currently holds several roles, including catalyst for JEDIFutures.org and podcast host of Terrified Nation. She also works with the Center for Collaborative Democracy, which is home to the Grand Bargain Project as a way to unify Americans by getting unstuck on six big issues, all at the same time. She previously co-founded BridgeAlliance, Living Room Conversations, and the National Week of Conversation. You can learn more about her work on LinkedIn.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.