The Language of Control: How policy and propaganda are reshaping the American experience

Every government tells a story about itself. In Donald Trump’s second term, that story is written in the language of efficiency. Each speech promises a leaner state, each policy a restoration of order. The phrases sound practical—discipline, accountability, sovereignty—but together they form a grammar of control. Their power lies not only in what they justify but in what they erase: the human texture of hunger, labor, and belonging that cannot be trimmed without consequence.

When the Department of Agriculture announced that it would end the Household Food Security Report after the 2024 edition, the explanation was familiar. Officials cited redundancy, waste, and the need to depoliticize data. Within their logic, this was modernization—one less dataset to manage. But the timing was impossible to ignore. That same month, the administration advanced proposals to reduce the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by nearly three hundred billion dollars over the next decade. What disappears first is never random. When visibility wanes, accountability follows.

Supporters of the change argue that responsibility for welfare belongs closer to local communities. They speak of restoring dignity and choice, trusting families to build resilience without dependency. Yet those words overlook how resilience is rationed. When federal aid recedes, it is not governors who fill the gap but exhausted mothers, disabled workers, and elders living on fixed incomes. The unpaid care that sustains the nation expands quietly to absorb every cut. Efficiency, in practice, means someone else is working for free.

The pattern continues at the border. In June 2025, Trump federalized segments of the National Guard to “temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government functions.” The order was framed as temporary, necessary, and lawful. It was all three. But legality and wisdom rarely travel together. Soldiers stood beside immigration agents as families sought entry or asylum, and the line between protection and intimidation blurred in real time. The administration called it security. Those who lived under the watch of rifles called it fear.

This same narrowing of distance between force and policy shapes the president’s restoration of Schedule F. The executive order reclassifies thousands of civil-service positions as political appointments, a move defended as accountability. The idea is simple: government should answer to elected power. Yet such accountability tilts quickly toward obedience. The civil servants most affected—analysts, caseworkers, public-health staff—are often the ones who hold the continuity of public life together. Their stability safeguards the programs that care for children, feed families, and maintain safety nets. When that continuity becomes conditional, so does the compassion embedded within it.

All of these decisions align with a broader effort to concentrate control while calling it renewal. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 laid out the blueprint in its “Mandate for Leadership”—a plan to centralize authority in the executive branch, limit social spending, and expand the role of religious and private entities in public welfare. It was marketed as moral realignment. But in practice, this “mandate” shifts both burden and blame downward. The state recedes, and the most precarious among us—immigrants, low-income parents, the sick—inherit its abandoned responsibilities.

Those who defend these choices often do so in good faith. They believe a disciplined government will restore order and fiscal strength. And they are right that reform is sometimes necessary. But every reform measures what it values by what it is willing to sacrifice. Ending the hunger report may streamline data collection, but it also erases the nation’s clearest reflection of need. Deploying troops at the border may project control, but it also teaches the public that suffering must be met with spectacle. Reclassifying civil servants may speed decision-making, but it also transforms service into servitude.

These are not isolated policies; they are expressions of a moral hierarchy that defines worth through productivity and power through silence. It is a hierarchy that insists care is optional, that compassion is a private expense rather than a public duty. Underneath its bureaucratic tone lies an older story—the same one that has long rewarded those who can endure hunger and punished those who name it.

The consequences are not abstract. They live in kitchen tables without enough on them, in clinics closing early for lack of funding, in overworked parents who become the safety net the government withdrew. They live in the quiet normalization of cruelty as efficiency. When power speaks of discipline, someone’s softness is being mistaken for weakness.

Trump and his allies will call these accusations unfair. They will say that critics confuse reform with repression, that the nation must choose between order and chaos. But order that depends on invisibility is not stability—it is denial. And denial, once institutionalized, becomes policy.

A functioning democracy does not fear measurement; it depends on it. It does not trade transparency for speed or empathy for uniformity. Its duty is not to perfect control, but to sustain care. The real work of governance is not performed in grand gestures or martial strength, but in the daily, unglamorous commitment to see everyone it governs.

The language of control may quiet the noise of dissent, but it cannot feed a nation, or heal it, or make it whole. A country that confuses power with precision will always mistake compliance for peace. The task before us is simple, though not easy: to remember that efficiency without mercy is not discipline—it is decay.