The empathy struggle when cuts hit WA’s Trump country

“More federal layoffs at Eastern WA nuclear contamination site,” read the headlines this past week.

Prompted by the Elon Musk-led cost-cutting spree, the Department of Energy has in the past month slashed 16% of its administrators who oversee the cleanup of the old Hanford nuclear-bomb-making factories.

A Hanford site manager predicted more carnage is coming: “I don’t think we are at the end.”

This has upset locals. The newspaper, the Tri-City Herald, recently excoriated their congressman, U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, for not doing anything to stop it.

“Residents of Washington’s 4th Congressional District did not elect Newhouse to stand idly by as President Donald Trump dismantles the federal government,” an editorial fumed.

To which I wondered: Didn’t they?

The 4th Congressional District runs from Canada to Oregon in a strip in Central Washington. It’s the reddest sector of the state, having just voted for Trump by a landslide 21-point margin.

Trump explicitly campaigned on taking a chain saw to federal programs and the civil service. Before the election, he said Musk would be his “Secretary of Cost-Cutting,” and the two pledged to hack “at least $2 trillion” out of federal spending — about 30% of the total budget.

Where did the good residents of the 4th think that money was going to come from?

The 4th is famously the most government-dependent part of the state. It’s basically a company town, where the company is Uncle Sam.

Partly this is due to the $3 billion-per-year Hanford project. Partly it’s the system of federal dams and reclamation projects that provide farms with subsidized irrigation water. But it’s also the place in the state where residents rely most heavily on government assistance programs.

Example: 38% of the people in the 4th are enrolled in Medicaid, the low-income health program. This is by far the highest percentage in the state. By contrast, in Seattle’s 7th District it’s just 14%, according to the Washington State Health Care Authority.

Yet Republicans, led by Trump and including the 4th’s Newhouse, are pushing a budget downsizing that if adopted will lead to major cuts in Medicaid.

Or take education. Trump campaigned on shuttering the federal Department of Education completely. Which Washington district is most reliant on spending from that department? The 4th.

The anti-government politics of the 4th has been a paradox for decades. Fifteen years ago, its congressman was a leading national critic of the 2009 federal “stimulus” program that aimed to jump start America out of the Great Recession. Except out of all 435 congressional districts, which one got the most financial bang from that stimulus — more than $3,700 per person? You guessed it.

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, has been doing what Newhouse has not — fighting like crazy against the worst of the above cuts that excessively target his district. But lately I’ve been thinking: Voters there keep asking for all this. So why not let them have it?

Same with Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, who this past week pointed out, correctly, that Trump’s tariffs in his first term cost Eastern Washington farmers millions, and that the repeat will be worse. It’s “a nightmare for our farmers,” she said.

OK, but Trump pledged endlessly in the campaign to impose big tariffs, and farmers tended to back him anyway. So surely nothing is so predictable as this nightmare?

I keep reading these interviews of Trump voters who got fired, or whose family member got deported, or whose business is being whipsawed by tariffs. My knee-jerk reaction is the same as it is for the 4th District: What in the world did you expect?

So part of me says: Let ‘em have it. Good and hard, if that’s how it turns out.

This is a terrible impulse on my part. It suggests a disturbing lack of empathy. I see it repeated everywhere, though — “eff around and find out,” the saying goes — so I know it’s not just me. I’m calling it out in myself because it feels like an empathy deficit, or full-on schadenfreude, is becoming a political epidemic.

The federal budget is out of whack and does need to be right-sized. Ideally that would happen through a combination of targeted cuts and tax increases on corporations and the rich. That’s what they did back in the 1990s — the last time the federal ledger was not deeply in the red.

What Republicans are pushing now is the opposite. As Murray aptly described it, the rich are being cued up for huge tax cuts despite the deficit. While civil service workers are being fired “on a whim because two billionaires don’t have a clue about what they do, and don’t care to learn.”

But again: Isn’t this what Trump country signed up for? It’s what he said he would do. Sure there’s the chaos, and his kinglike heedlessness for the rule of law, but that was all easily foreseeable based on Trump’s governing style the first time around.

Back to my struggles to sympathize with the 4th District: I know this is wrong. In fact, it’s worse — it’s downright Trumpian. It’s exactly how he treats places like my city, Seattle. Not as a diverse and unique corner of America defined by a common humanity, but solely by its dominant political stripes. It’s another form of wall-building.

So, folks, I’m back from vacation, and engaged in the Sisyphean challenge of our moment. Which is to try not to forfeit whatever principles I have left to this man.

Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com. Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.