Cruelty Index
Policies can be progressive or conservative, life-enhancing or wealth-enriching,
cost-effective or wasteful, good or bad.
Policies can be progressive or conservative, life-enhancing or wealth-enriching,
cost-effective or wasteful, good or bad.
The Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise,” published in April 2023, is nearly 900 pages of extreme right-wing policy proposals that will increase inequities, poverty, and hardship.
The Preamble to the Constitution includes "promote the general Welfare" as a fundamental purpose of government.
Project 2025's proposals do exactly the opposite.
Several of its authors have been tapped to join the president-elect’s team, and it is widely considered a roadmap for the incoming administration. It is so far the most comprehensive picture of what we can expect from the President-Elect.
Some of these policies are breathtakingly cruel.
We can learn a great deal about the cabinet members and key staff by looking to their histories and bodies of work.
Click here for Cruelty Index flags of nominees to date.
The America First Policy Institute, run by several members of the first Trump administration, is said to have over 300 Executive Orders ready for signature on January 20, 2025.
Click here for a list of EOs with Cruelty Index assessments.
The president-elect and his top senior staff are prolific communicators using social media. While posts don't have the power of law, they provide insight into likely policy changes.
Click here for key statements, posts, and transition press releases.
Formal White House documents other than Executive Orders include press releases and administrative orders as well as Presidential Proclamations, Memoranda, Determinations, Notices, and Administrative Orders.
Click here for other formal White House documents.
The President-Elect is appointing people who are promising to inflict pain, and some of the policies being put in place are designed to intentionally cause distress, create fear, and foment hostility.
There are plenty of just-plain bad nominees and policies as well, but this site focuses on exposing deliberate and calculated actions to cause suffering: those which target vulnerable communities, take revenge on enemies, normalize hatred and hostility, and use oppression and discrimination to advance a political agenda.
Good governance maximizes public benefit and minimizes private harm. A government action (policy, program, statement) that creates an excess of private harm over public benefit has a type of deadweight loss -- a cost that brings no value which results in the good not outweighing the bad.
But that alone does not equal cruelty. Policy changes have associated costs, but not all costs have associated cruelty. Private harm is a subset of cost.
Cruelty is the result when the government action is undertaken with a callous indifference to that excess private harm or, worse, with a goal of creating that excess private harm.
The analyses presented on this website examine the elements of cruelty in the actions, statements, and policies of new administration by comparing benefits to its harms. This is a form of traditional cost-benefit analysis, but here we try to go beyond costs to isolate and identify the excess harm that will lead to new suffering: cruelty.
Cruelty may be direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional. Cruelty may be just a side effect of a poorly designed policy, or it may be the point of the policy. Questions to be asked:
Statements made by government officials may reveal the degree to which the cruelty is a side effect or whether the cruelty is the point. Statements made by government officials may themselves merit a cruelty assessment.
Both terms are subjective, but they are guided in this analysis by these four principles:
WE ARE ALL PEOPLE. Vilifying human beings based on protected categories or external characteristics (such as employment in a particular industry or history of political opposition to the administration) is prima facie cruel. Privacy harm and statements encouraging violence, hostility, or discrimination are cruel.
DOLLARS ARE NOT ALL EQUAL. Increasing, protecting, and concentrating private wealth is less good than redistributing wealth among the not-wealthy: the economic utility of an extra dollar at the top tax bracket is not equal to the economic utility of an extra dollar at the bottom tax bracket.
NOW COUNTS MORE THAN LATER. Future public good (or private harm) is discounted relative to current public good (or private harm).
INFORMATION IS A PUBLIC GOOD. Actions or policies that have the effect of limiting knowledge, speech, or the press may be cruel.
To estimate the public benefit of a policy that reduces the size of government through staff or program elimination, this analysis uses the following method to calculate the taxpayer benefit:
Roughly half of federal revenue comes from the individual income tax, and roughly one-tenth comes from corporate taxpayers; this analysis assumes that any reduction in federal cost is assumed to be borne in those proportions. If the cost of a program or office to be eliminated is distributed equally among current-year taxpayers, then one-half of the cost will be shared by 163 million income tax taxpayers, and one-tenth of the cost will be shared by 13.5 million corporate tax taxpayers.
Using this (admittedly simplistic) measure, then eliminating a program or office valued at $100 million would result in lower taxes of $0.31 per income tax taxpayer and $0.74 per corporate tax taxpayers.
Put another way, for an average one-dollar savings to income tax taxpayers, federal spending must be reduced by $336 million.
The new administration has committed to significant changes to nearly all aspects of the federal government. We already know that some policies the president-elect has publicly committed to are viciously cruel; we must also research the impacts of lower-profile policies that we don’t yet know about.
The Cruelty Index will review Executive Orders and legislation; it will also begin highlighting problematic policies that have been embraced by presidential nominees.
Several types of policies are outside the scope of the Cruelty Index analysis: organizational restructure, selection of political appointees, prioritization of resources. This analysis focuses first on economic and social welfare; international affairs, environmental policy, and transportation policies are a secondary focus.
This work will be necessarily shallow, especially at the beginning of the Administration. Where possible, we will provide links for further reading to respected people and organizations with subject matter expertise.
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