Sabotage Disguised as Stewardship: Why the Damage May Be Irreversible

How a calculated campaign of cuts, tariffs, and institutional erosion is dismantling the American future—one budget line at a time.

Re-post from James B. Greenberg May 20, 2025

You can kill a country without firing a shot. All it takes is dismantling the systems that make collective life possible—education, science, public health, infrastructure—and calling it fiscal responsibility. That’s the genius of modern sabotage: it doesn’t scream crisis. It shows up looking like a spreadsheet.

This isn’t mismanagement. This is abandonment. This is sabotage. This is a deliberate withdrawal from the very idea of the public good. And the longer we pretend it’s accidental, the harder it will be to repair what’s being deliberately broken.

What makes it even harder to confront is the story we’re told about it. A story dressed in the language of common sense. You’ve heard it: “The government should budget like a family does.” It sounds reasonable. Familiar. Even responsible.

But it’s also deeply wrong.

Republicans love to compare the national budget to a household checkbook. It’s one of those metaphors that feels intuitive—tidy, humble, self-reliant—but disintegrates when examined. The federal budget isn’t your grocery list, and the economy isn’t your kitchen table. Yet this folksy analogy has been weaponized to justify deep cuts to education, scientific research, public health, and infrastructure—as if they were reckless indulgences instead of the scaffolding of modern civilization.

But here’s the thing: not all expenditures are created equal. Some disappear the moment they’re made—on fuel, food, or luxury. Others build value over time. They are investments, not expenses. A bridge doesn’t vanish after it’s built. A vaccinated population doesn’t need to be hospitalized en masse. An educated generation doesn’t have to be micromanaged. These are not costs to be trimmed—they are capital. They are how societies endure.

Anthropology teaches us to see systems not just as machines but as ecologies—dense, interconnected, and dynamic. In such systems, small changes can have cascading effects. Pull out key elements—teachers, researchers, inspectors—and entire feedback loops collapse. That’s not just poor management. That’s structural neglect. That’s entropy with a human cause.

This is why the damage we are witnessing may not be reversible. Cuts to public goods don’t simply pause progress; they hollow out the very architecture on which complex systems depend. Opportunity is lost. Knowledge is forgotten. Trust collapses. And in its place, the machinery of state becomes brittle—responsive only to the powerful, incapable of adaptation, hostile to innovation.

The Trump administration’s agenda has been particularly brutal in this regard. Under the guise of budget discipline, it has waged a campaign of economic sabotage. The tariffs alone pushed thousands of small businesses toward bankruptcy. They triggered job loss, inflation, and shockwaves through tax bases, retirement accounts—even the global standing of the dollar.

Mass deportations, another tool in this arsenal, hollow out entire economic sectors—agriculture, construction, elder care—crippling productivity in the name of punishment. These policies don’t enhance national security. They constrict the economy, undercut local resilience, and entrench inequality. What emerges is a slower, meaner, more divided nation—one with fewer tools to meet the future, and fewer allies to face it with.

And here’s where the anthropology of collapse becomes essential. Societies don’t usually fall in one spectacular moment. They fray. Quietly. Complexity gives way to fragility. Coordination to factionalism. Translation—between science and policy, between need and response, between the governed and the governing—begins to fail. And in that failure, systems don’t just slow down. They decay.

What’s happening now isn’t just an ideological shift. It’s a re-engineering of the state to serve fewer and fewer people, while extracting more and more from the rest. The logic is not fiscal—it’s feudal. The goal is not efficiency—it’s enclosure. And the outcomes, if unchallenged, will not be easily undone.

Some investments, once missed, cannot be reclaimed. A closed lab doesn’t restart itself. A child denied education doesn’t get those years back. A nation that loses its sense of public purpose can’t simply vote its way back to coherence.

This isn’t about debt. It’s about what we choose to value—and what we allow to rot. The cost of neglect isn’t measured in dollars. It’s measured in lost capacity, abandoned futures, and systems degraded past the point of repair.

Public investment isn’t generosity. It’s how we hold the future together. Once it crumbles, there may be no rebuilding.

Suggested Readings:

Galbraith, James K. The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. New York: Free Press, 2008.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

Lansing, J. Stephen. Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

Rappaport, Roy A. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1979.

Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.