India’s capitalist class is large and heterogeneous, and it suffers from a long-standing collective action problem. It consists of big industrial capital, manufacturing capital that is tied to particular regions and has relatively limited mobility outside them, and a mass of small manufacturing capitalists and agrarian capitalists. Each faction has distinct short-term interests, none is able to conclusively impose its own interests, and no political regime has succeeded in brokering a long-term agreement between them.

The power of big and regional capital over state policy derives from its control over investment and its ability to bankroll favorable political vehicles. Agrarian and small manufacturing capitalists influence policymaking through their electoral influence, which derives from their own significant numbers and their ability to build wide electoral coalitions — with medium, small, and marginal peasants in the case of the former, and petty traders in the case of the latter.

Although capital accumulated in agriculture has been invested in regional manufacturing, especially since the 1990s, and some regional players have broken into the ranks of big capital, divergent policy preferences persist. In the 1960s, the defection of agrarian and regional capitalists precipitated the first major downturn in the INC’s electoral fortunes. Its marginalization as a serious contender for national power since 2014 stems from the big industrial bourgeoisie deserting it in favor of the BJP. The BJP has only recently shifted allegiance from its traditional base of small capitalists and traders and recast itself as a party of big capital.

Though big capital is unquestionably the dominant faction in India’s ruling coalition, two factors constrain the capacity of the state to act in its interests. First of all, the adoption of political democracy based on universal adult franchise in 1947 empowered classes that might have been dispossessed by an industrial transformation — small manufacturing and agrarian capital, small and marginal peasants, and a large mass of people surviving through petty commodity production, trade, and services — to influence state policy.

These classes are a durable presence in India’s capitalist economy, partly due to their political empowerment. Of these groups, small manufacturing and agrarian capitalists have been the best organized, even managing to rise, albeit briefly, to national dominance in India’s era of coalition governments.

Agrarian capitalists in particular have exercised a great deal of influence over policy, particularly at the state level, winning huge concessions by leading wide electoral coalitions couched in the language of “urban bias.” Although sharpening class differentiation has fractured these coalitions and the political clout of agrarian capitalists has declined since its peak in the 1980s, especially following extensive pro-business reforms in the 1990s, they continue to limit the state’s space for maneuver.

Secondly, the Indian state has little presence in India’s sprawling informal economy, which accounts for between 90 and 95 percent of livelihoods and 50 percent of GDP. For much of India’s history since 1947, the state, and the Congress party, which acted as a key integrative institution, have relied on patron-client ties with locally dominant elites to carry on the business of government away from urban centers and the regulated economy.

The informal economy, comprised of agriculture, small manufacturing, and assorted forms of petty production, exists entirely outside state regulation and taxation. This is the result both of historically limited state capacity rooted in patterns of colonial state formation and the deliberate creation, by omission and commission, of zones of nonregulation to create new opportunities for capital accumulation.

This strategy has worked especially to the advantage of electorally significant sections of the capitalist class. The minimum threshold of “small” enterprises has repeatedly been revised upward, allowing more proprietors to access state patronage in the form of subsidies, licences to produce goods reserved for small industries, exemption from taxation, and labor law. Agrarian capitalists are similarly exempt from taxation and labor and environmental regulations, while continuing to claim a significant, if declining, portion of public wealth.

After independence, the influence of big capital over the Congress leadership ensured the adoption of a strategy of state-led industrialization. This was no small task. Outside of pockets of industrial development, the overwhelmingly agrarian economy was dominated by forms of capitalist accumulation that squeezed high rents and interest rates from a large pool of labor with very little bargaining power working at very low levels of productivity. Even industrialists moved capital to rural trade and moneylending in pursuit of quick returns.

To address the endemic capital and technological constraints that plagued the Indian economy, the state created a protected domestic market, invested in infrastructure and capital goods, and provided subsidized inputs and cheap credit to capitalists. Land reforms were supposed to increase agricultural productivity, expand the domestic market, and generate investible surpluses for industrialization.

However, the state lacked the capacity to discharge the substantial burdens of investment and social engineering that it assumed. Land reforms were defeated by a war of attrition waged by agrarian capitalists who dominated government and the Congress party at local and state levels. The agrarian constraint on industrial development therefore remained in place.

Far from ensuring an efficient use of scarce public resources by big capitalist firms, the state ended up acting as risk absorber and guarantor of profits. The twenty-odd firms that dominated the regulated economy enjoyed assured profits without any compulsion to raise productivity.

The 1960s and ’70s witnessed the substantial accumulation of capital outside the regulated economy and the emergence of new factions of capital. In the 1970s, directed credit and the reservation of hundreds of product categories for small industries led to an increase in the number of small-scale industrial units. The adoption of the New Agrarian Strategy (NAS) greatly accelerated capitalist growth in agriculture. A new section of the big industrial bourgeoisie nurtured by copious state patronage also developed in this period.

The failure to execute land reforms and engineer an agrarian transformation meant that the demand constraint persisted. The state struggled to maintain the levels of investment required to sustain accumulation in industry. As an alternative, the NAS promoted energy- and capital-intensive agricultural methods by incentivizing private investment through input subsidies and guaranteed output prices.

This dramatic reversal in patterns of patronage led to a serious deceleration in industrial growth, as public resources were diverted away from industry to pay for subsidized fertilizers and pump-sets, cheap credit, cheap electricity, and above-market output prices. Electricity subsidies for agricultural users were offset by higher tariffs for industrial and commercial users, while the former also enjoyed preference in the allocation of scarce supply.

With profitability thus guaranteed, substantial capital accumulated in agriculture, which in turn financed the development of regional capital. The political clout of agrarian capitalists ensured that attempts to divert a portion of this surplus through taxation or adverse terms of trade were defeated.

Capital accumulation in the Indian economy depends on the state, not only to secure the conditions of exploitation but also to ensure profitability through routine direct transfers of public wealth. Competition for state patronage is thus a central point of conflict between different factions of capital. From 1956 to 1967, the big bourgeoisie’s disproportionate claim over public investment was virtually uncontested, thanks to the INC’s firm grip on power at the center and in all the states.

The party enjoyed a great deal of legitimacy during this period, and India’s electoral system was not truly competitive. Intra-elite conflicts were handled within the Congress, political opposition was fragmented, and the bulk of the rural electorate was managed through the agrarian capitalists who acted as “linkmen.” These “all-in-alls” often controlled local markets in land, labor, credit, inputs, and output, delivering the votes of the rural poor under their sway in exchange for patronage.

During the 1960s and ’70s, this arrangement unraveled as the Congress faced stiff competition from regional and right-wing parties, including the Bhartiya Jan Sangh (precursor to the BJP), representing factions of capital outside the charmed circle of direct patronage. The defection of agrarian capitalists eroded the Congress’s electoral machine at a time when the political terrain was becoming increasingly fractious.

The result was that fiscal populism — promising subsidies for votes — became commonplace, effectively institutionalizing the tendency to prioritize short-term spending over long-term public investment. From 1977 to 1980, the Janata party government established a regime of patronage that favored its base of rural, small, and regional capitalists — one that outlasted its short stint in power at the center.

The political clout of agrarian capitalists ensured that governments left agricultural incomes untaxed, abolished land taxes, waived agricultural loans, condoned mass defaults on dues to public power corporations, maintained input subsidies, and kept output prices artificially high. In the 1980s, the inter-sectoral terms of trade shifted in favor of agriculture. With its inelastic tax base, the state paid for this with dangerous levels of deficit financing. This laid the basis for recurring fiscal crises, the worst of which provided an alibi for economic liberalization in 1990.

In the early 1990s, the Congress government substantially changed trade and industrial policy to deregulate investment and markets. These were pro-business yet not pro-market reforms; they supported accumulation by existing firms rather than creating a competitive market economy. This was done by redirecting credit from public sector banks toward big capital. This reckless lending drove much of India’s post-liberalization growth and created a regime of
“riskless capitalism” where capitalist profits were guaranteed while public sector banks absorbed huge losses.

In anticipation of a political backlash, agricultural reforms were delayed till 1998, when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) took power. The implementation of reforms was left to state governments as a way of dividing opposition, but the general trend was one of declining government procurement prices and quantities, a contraction of formal credit, and falling agricultural prices.

Nevertheless, agricultural incomes remained untaxed and input subsidies, which disproportionately benefited the rich, remained steady despite large cuts to welfare spending. The backlash came in 2004 as the NDA lost rural voters and the general election. Mindful of this, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which won two consecutive terms in office from 2004 to 2014, slowed down reform in politically controversial areas. It also halted the disinvestment of public corporations and increased welfare spending to unprecedented levels.

The dependence of the Congress on its coalition partners was a factor in this slowdown. These allies included an assortment of regional parties, representing rural and regional capitalists and, in its first term, India’s communist parties. The Congress was seen as a party unable, if not unwilling, to discipline farm lobbies and decisively push the reform agenda. Remarkably, from 2004–5 to 2013–14, the terms of trade moved further in favor of agriculture owing to rising procurement prices.

By 2011–12, the global recession and a bad loans crisis made the extravagant public expenditure that had guaranteed profitability for big capital unsustainable. Furthermore, in 2013, the INC’s reputation as a party friendly to big capital took a major hit with the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARRA).

Under pressure from a nationwide movement against displacement and the forced cheapening of land by using the state’s power of eminent domain to benefit large corporations, the law introduced protective provisions that made the acquisition of land more difficult. This was especially odious to big capital since accumulation relied heavily on ventures that required large swathes of land, such as mining and real estate speculation.

More generally, the regionalization of politics, reflected in the reliance of national parties on regional coalition powers to form governments and the decentralization of economic policy, created a heterogeneous policy environment that was unfavorable to big capital. Furthermore, state governments are vulnerable to the influence of competing factions of capital, particularly rural interests, irrespective of the party in power.

The support of the big bourgeoisie was a key element in the BJP’s victories in the general elections in 2014, 2019, and 2024. This period has seen an unprecedented concentration of capital and skyrocketing inequality.

The BJP’s parliamentary majorities in the first two elections enabled it to aggressively pursue its campaign promises to big capital. It has cut welfare spending, introduced long-desired reforms in labor law, and vigorously accelerated the asset stripping of publicly owned corporations. It has also forgiven a much larger volume of bad debts owed by large corporations to public sector banks than the UPA — a bailout in all but name.

In addition, the BJP government has unexpectedly moved against its traditional base of traders and small capitalists and reversed the policy of deliberate nonregulation by enacting a Goods and Service Tax (GST), purportedly to formalize the economy and expand the state’s tax base. A general trend toward centralization in India’s already asymmetrical federal structure works to the advantage of big capital.

The GST creates a unified indirect tax system and further curtails state control over taxation. The ability of state governments to evade central financial controls through off-budget borrowing that does not manifest itself in fiscal deficits has been curbed, preventing them from making good on loan waivers and other concessions promised to rural lobbies during election campaigns.

In the changed policy climate, a number of states, not all of them BJP-ruled, have amended land reform laws and accelerated the deregulation of land markets to favor industry. They have removed land ceilings (a key obstacle to corporate agribusiness) and eased the conversion of agricultural land for nonagricultural purposes.

Although the neoliberal policy consensus is shared by forces across the political spectrum in India, including by communist, socialist, and social democratic parties, the present BJP government has pushed it further than any regime since the 1990s. However, it has also hit familiar limits thanks to the electoral weight of the rural sector. This remains significant, even though the wide coalitions of the 1980s, led by agrarian capitalists that managed to draw in middle, small, and marginal peasants, have crumbled in the meantime, with sharper class differences in the countryside since the 1990s.

After losing power at the center in 2004, the BJP used an amended policy of narrowly targeted subsidies promoting labor-displacing technology in the cultivation of high-value crops for export to bring agrarian capitalists back into the circle of beneficiaries in states where it ruled. Fertilizer and food subsidies (which benefit surplus-producing farmers) have remained substantial, with the former even rising to an all-time high in 2022 when the government increased subsidies to absorb a price surge. Political opposition has stalled a law intended to reform the power sector and help recover the $75 billion owed to public power corporations.

At state level, the BJP, like any other party, has also promised loan waivers in the run-up to elections. A bid to further deregulate agricultural output markets and weaken MSP guarantees was defeated by a movement led by left-wing farm unions that represent middle, small, and marginal farmers — the only time in the last two decades that the BJP has had to conceded defeat on a major policy move. In the end, the consolidation of the BJP’s hegemony appears to have ameliorated, although not resolved, the crisis of bourgeois leadership precipitated by the decline of the Congress.

A number of the new OMB appointees are not what one would expect from a typical Republican administration and point to some of the ideological complexities of the Trump movement. Maybe the most interesting is associate director for Economic Policy and the Made in America Office Michael Stumo, the former founding CEO of the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA), a think tank and pressure group for US producers, and which for decades has called for the kind of trade policy Trump has pursued over the past few months.

Stumo, a former farmer and lawyer, was the third generation in his family involved in the National Farmers Organization, a populist farmers group that moved from militant, aggressive protest in the 1960s to collective bargaining, legal action, and lobbying on behalf of family farms. Related by marriage to Ralph Nader, the two fought together in 1996 to keep inpatient care at a local Connecticut hospital facing cuts after consolidating with a nearby provider. A year later, Stumo ran on the Democratic slate for the local school board. He would later make two donations to Nader’s 2008 Green Party presidential run, his only donation to a presidential candidate on record. (Full disclosure: Stumo’s daughter was a friend of the author before her death.)

Despite CPA’s role in shaping Vought’s Project 2025 guidebook — the group was on Project 2025’s advisory board, and one of CPA’s former personnel is listed as a contributor — it doesn’t seem like Stumo has made a complete ideological U-turn: Stumo’s wife, Nadia Milleron, who ran an independent campaign for a congressional seat last year, told the Berkshire Eagle that both she and her husband only agreed with the trade portion of Project 2025, which she said was otherwise full of “toxicity.”

For years, Stumo’s target was big agriculture and corporate consolidation in farming. In 1998, he helped found the Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM), formed by a group of farmers, ranchers, and others alarmed at small producers being squeezed by low prices artificially set by a shrinking number of bigger and bigger buyers. Those views met dismissal, with prominent conservative economist Luther Tweeten casting OCM as part of an irrational, emotion-driven coalition that he charged had protested the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.

“Conspiracy theories bind them together. They largely view corporate America, including the commercial agriculture establishment, as the enemy,” Tweeten had written.

OCM was positioned as fighting for a competitive, well-regulated free market, with Stumo warning that “the natural law of supply and demand is no longer operating unhindered in the agricultural marketplace” and that US farming was “evolving before our eyes toward monopoly-controlled markets of the failed Soviet system.” As its general counsel, he fought for government action against monopolistic behavior by agribusiness, and for policies like a moratorium on agricultural mergers, a ban on meat companies owning livestock, and country-of-origin labeling, while criticizing regulatory capture at the Department of Agriculture.

But it’s the CPA — which Stumo cofounded in 2007, and all of whose strategic activities, including research and communication, he has been described as being responsible for — where the clearest through line to Trump’s trade policies emerges.

Envisioned as a self-consciously bipartisan coalition of agricultural producers, manufacturers, and unions fighting against neoliberal trade policy, the CPA has pushed a consistent, single-minded message for nearly two decades: US manufacturing and farming has been hollowed out by years of corporate-friendly trade policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), leaving the United States with a job-destroying trade deficit — “our great recession that we are trying to come out of right now,” as Stumo told a farmers group in 2009 — and radical moves must be taken to turn the United States back into a producer nation instead of an enormous consumer market for the rest of the world.

“If we want jobs, you have to produce things here,” he said in that same 2009 speech. “We consume too much and produce too little.”

While pundits and politicians were convinced the pre-pandemic US economy was humming, Stumo argued, the reality is that the loss of US manufacturing had pushed millions of Americans into meager-paying and low-quality service jobs. A series of “globalist” leaders like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt had pushed the United States away from the Hamiltonian model that had made the country a superpower — high tariffs that fund the government, a concerted industrial strategy, and a focus on manufacturing to ensure self-sufficiency — to an economy based on consumption, a strong dollar, and free trade. But this “free trade,” he said, is really a “myth,” a “pink unicorn which many talk and write about but none have seen,” owing to the rampant cheating other countries resort to.

Where the OCM made monopolistic firms the target of its ire, for CPA the cause of the nation’s ills lay at the feet of US trade partners, one above all: China, about which Stumo and the CPA’s rhetoric has evolved. While in 2009 he faulted US leadership for not having developed a national economic strategy like its rivals — “They have a plan, we don’t, and when you don’t have a plan and the other guy does, you lose,” he said of China and India — by the Trump era, it had become more hostile.

By 2017 and beyond, Stumo tended to talk about China’s “economic aggression,” saying that its economic plans had “targeted and taken out” US industries, that it was China that had already started and waged a trade war going back to 1994, and that beyond trade policy, it was essential to stop a “dystopian China” from replacing Washington as “the new global superpower and the new global policeman.”

In some ways, Stumo and the CPA’s position may be more hawkish than Trump’s, expressing wariness about the president’s attempts to strike a trade deal with the country in his first term, and preferring “no deal with China than a bad one.” (In fairness, China never did follow through on the pledge it made in the agreement to buy an extra $200 billion worth of US exports.)

Stumo argues that China, though not only China, puts up a variety of nontariff barriers that make “free trade” a lie, like currency manipulation and value-added taxes, arguments that closely echo Trump’s rhetoric since “Liberation Day.” But he takes a more expansive definition of trade cheating that goes beyond these and other common complaints like China’s theft of trade secrets, a definition that includes government subsidies and state ownership of key industries. At the same time, Stumo has called this approach China’s own particular “variant of the Hamiltonian model” that the United States abandoned, and which he came to view Trump as potentially restoring.

“The Trump trade team is dominated by Hamiltonians,” he told an audience of the John William Pope and Jesse Helms Center Foundations in 2018.

As part of this Hamiltonian model, Stumo and the CPA have backed bills allowing for US trade retaliation against these nontariff barriers, taxing companies for the profits they make on sales within the United States, putting strategic trade restrictions on and even ending permanent normal trade relations with China, as well as restarting domestic supply chains. They also backed a variety of tariffs against US trade partners, particularly Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs on China, which the organization contended wouldn’t see costs passed on to American consumers, and put out several studies disputing their negative effect on the US economy and jobs. (A number of studies since have come to the opposite conclusion).

They’ve also opposed a variety of free-trade deals over the years, whether NAFTA or the ultimately doomed Trans-Pacific Partnership, on which the CPA was part of a largely left-leaning coalition opposing, but also backed pulling out of the US trade deal with South Korea. Over the years, they have backed a number of key Trump trade officials, first among them National Trade Council head (and now US trade advisor) Peter Navarro, the single individual most responsible for Trump’s tariff regime, with whom they are particularly aligned. Stumo has called Navarro a “hero” of the CPA and applauded his appointment to the second Trump administration.

The most contentious part of Stumo and the CPA’s views may be on the US dollar, which clash somewhat with Trump’s insistence on maintaining its reserve currency status. Stumo has cast that status in a leading role in the story of US manufacturing woes, arguing that Richard Nixon taking the country off the gold standard in 1971 led to a global binge of dollar-buying that pushed up the dollar’s value, making US exports more expensive and so less competitive, kicking off the decades of trade deficits that followed. A dollar that stays overvalued, he said in 2017, will effectively negate any positive effects of tariffs, and fixing the trade imbalances central to US economic woes “will be extraordinarily difficult until we solve the currency misalignment problem.”

As a result, the CPA has pushed for personnel and policies that favor a weaker dollar, like a market access charge, a fee on foreign investors buying dollar-denominated assets that would rise and fall based on the size of the US trade deficit. Stumo and the CPA contend that lowering the dollar’s exchange value would create millions of jobs and grow the economy, and that this can be done without jeopardizing its reserve status. All of it may point the way to the administration’s future moves on trade (though recent US trade talks have reportedly not featured terms to weaken the dollar).

Stumo’s inclusion at OMB points to the way that Trumpworld has absorbed ideological currents and disaffected constituencies that in years past would have been found on the political left, and already seems to have translated on a policy level. Whether it will continue to do so and how remains to be seen.

Stumo is not the only Trump OMB appointee who offers surprises. Installed as associate director for justice and transportation is former state trial court judge Katharine Sullivan, who has the prerequisite right-wing bonafides, having served as a senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation — a conservative think tank whose policy recommendations have a habit of dovetailing with the financial interests of the corporations and oligarchs bankrolling it.

But Sullivan, a recovered alcoholic, has also advocated for less punitive solutions to drug offenses, like letting fentanyl traffickers finish a licensed treatment program to expunge their records. As a judge in Colorado’s Eagle County, Sullivan created a treatment program for repeat, non-violent drug and alcohol offenders as an alternative to prison time, 70 percent of whose graduates committed no new offenses. But this still leaves Sullivan — who opposes both decriminalizing fentanyl and the use of prescription opioids for weaning addicts off drugs, and has appeared in Project 2025 videos calling for the removal of equity plans from government and the “noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology” from schools — well to the right of any progressive reformer.

Meanwhile, OMB associate director of intelligence and foreign affairs Amaryllis Fox Kennedy sticks out in an administration largely stacked with hawks. Fox Kennedy, a former CIA operative and the daughter-in-law of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, had been Trump’s first pick for CIA director, but was torpedoed by Republican ultra-hawk Tom Cotton over a nine-year-old Al Jazeera interview in which she talked about the importance of seeing things from the enemy’s point of view.

“Everybody believes they’re the good guy,” Fox Kennedy named as one of the lessons she learned in the CIA. She recalled how an al-Qaeda member told her that from their perspective, Hollywood movies like Star Wars and Independence Day, where the scrappy underdog fights a more powerful invader, were really about groups like theirs, with the United States in the role of the villainous empire.

Fox Kennedy — who once lauded Ta-Nehisi Coates, said she “loves” Marianne Williamson, and demanded the killer of Heather Heyer, who was protesting against white supremacists in Charlottesville, be prosecuted as a domestic terrorist — has spoken elsewhere about the need to “understand their humanity” to end the US war against terrorists.

Even as she’s shifted to the MAGA right, many of Kennedy Fox’s foreign policy views, as espoused in an October 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson or her Twitter/X feed, sound indistinguishable from someone on the Left: a dislike of forever wars and how they’ve siphoned off wealth from domestic concerns, criticism of the CIA’s role in destabilizing foreign governments, a restraint- and peace-oriented line on Ukraine, and a concern about approaching war with Iran and preference for diplomacy with it.

But there’s one conflict these antiwar views don’t extend to: Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, which a growing number of genocide scholars and other experts, many of them Jewish and Israeli themselves, have deemed a genocide. Despite reactivating her Twitter/X account two weeks into the war, Fox Kennedy has acknowledged the “unbearable” human suffering of Gazan civilians but insists that Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of the territory is legitimate — even supporting a “UN-supervised evacuation” of Palestinians of Gaza to facilitate it.

But these names are outliers. Most of the OMB appointees point to the prevailing trends we’ve seen in the Trump administration so far, like a rigidly government-enforced social conservatism.

In the plum position of OMB senior advisor is longtime antiabortion lobbyist Stephen Billy. As the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America’s vice president of state affairs, Billy headed the antiabortion organization’s work at the state level, lobbying legislatures for bills that restricted reproductive rights and organizing against other bills and ballot measures that protected or expanded them.

Under Billy’s leadership, for instance, the organization worked against ballot measures aimed at rolling back state abortion bans and enshrining reproductive rights into their constitutions in states as far afield as Maryland, Florida, New York, and Ohio, with varying success — a majority of the pro–reproductive rights measures passed, including in Ohio, three months after its voters beat back an anti-choice-backed measure that would have made such ballot measures more difficult.

A letter Billy wrote to Congress shortly after that first Ohio defeat laid out some of the “reasonable national pro-life protections” he wished to see enacted, including a ban on abortions after at least fifteen weeks, as well as singling out the HOPE Act, which paired maternal care funding with some abortion restrictions, and Marco Rubio’s Providing for Life Act. That bill would have expanded the child tax credit and food stamps’ postpartum benefit eligibility, along with other, arguably regressive financial supports — letting parents use their Social Security benefits to pay for three months of parental leave, for instance, and making biological fathers pay at least half of a pregnancy’s out-of-pocket medical costs.

Billy himself was a registered lobbyist for the organization in at least a dozen different states, spanning Virginia to Utah. In Florida, Billy lobbied for the House version of what became the state’s Heartbeat Protection Act, which Planned Parenthood called a “near-total abortion ban,” since it bans any abortions after six weeks and throws delays in the path of anyone who finds out they are pregnant before then. In Nebraska, he lobbied for what became a twelve-week abortion ban and a provision giving tax credits to anyone who gives money to pregnancy crisis centers, though the push to institute Nebraska’s own version of Florida’s six-week ban didn’t stick.

Before that, Billy was one of a number of antiabortion activists on a webinar urging Republican lawmakers in Tennessee who were thinking of amending an ultra-strict abortion ban to add exceptions for rape and incest not to do so. According to a recording of the call obtained by ProPublica, when the subject of the exceptions came up, Billy advised legislators that “the other side’s position is an assumption that abortion is going to be the right decision at every point in time,” but that voters would back making their priority “to protect that child.”

Billy later also suggested Tennessee Republicans might, in a year or three, look at further regulating contraception and IVF, but that it wasn’t “the conversation that you need to have now” — suggesting an openness to go after reproductive health care beyond abortion, which Trump had backed away from on the campaign trail.

Billy held a similar position in the first Trump administration, when he was one of five White House officials investigated for misleading Congress about Trump’s attempt to effectively end the government’s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). There is unlikely to be a repeat this time, since Trump’s second term has instead been heavily leaning on OPM to carry out his program of mass firings.

Other appointees suggest a neoliberal direction on economic policy that’s of a piece with the past four months of White House policy but far from the populist line Trump ran on in 2016.

One is Mark Calabria, the former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) during Trump’s first term, who has been made the associate director for Treasury, housing, and commerce. Calabria’s appointment most likely signals a coming renewed push by Trump to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were put under government conservatorship during the 2008 financial crisis. That move was a key plank of the Project 2025 playbook drawn up by Vought, and Trump’s team was reportedly working on plans to do it during the campaign last year.

Calabria was an outspoken advocate for removing the two from conservatorship, both during the first Trump term, when as FHFA director he laid out a roadmap and began taking steps to that end, and in the twelve years he spent before and after his tenure at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. Joe Biden’s 2020 victory halted that effort, but Calabria has since said that nothing in the law “justifies an endless conservatorship” and, as recently as last December, that “there’s maybe a 70 percent chance” it could be done by 2027, owing to the groundwork he laid in Trump’s first term.

The risks to this are vast and wide-ranging. Because Fannie and Freddie guarantee around 70 percent of the country’s $12 trillion worth of private home loans, experts warn privatizing them could lead to higher mortgage interest rates, stricter lending requirements, less support for affordable home loans, and even the disappearance of the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, all of which would make it far harder for the average American to buy a house. More broadly, it could also inject extra volatility into the housing market and further undermine confidence in the US economy, as the two companies, newly privatized and operating by market logic, start taking more risks — only without the benefit of a federal guarantee for their trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgage securities.

Despite these risks, it could happen with the stroke of a pen. Calabria has said numerous times that a presidential administration could simply privatize them on its own, calling it a “myth” that “a regulator is supposed to wait for Congress before releasing the entities from conservatorship.” This would dovetail with the second Trump administration’s expansive, go-it-alone view of executive power, especially since one of the Trump team’s preelection plans for privatization involved bypassing Congress. Separately, Calabria has also said that if a GOP administration isn’t able to meet the conditions needed to safely privatize the two in four years, it should simply place them into receivership.

Calabria’s appointment may also signal a more conservative economic direction for the administration beyond Fannie and Freddie. In keeping with his free-market ideology, Calabria has favored a hands-off government role in the economy, to the point of calling for the repeal of the Wall Street regulations put in place after the big banks crashed the economy.

The list of Great Recession–era measures opposed by Calabria is vast: protections for credit card holders, mortgage “cramdown,” antitrust enforcement (“sometimes you really want a larger firm to take over a very small failing firm,” Calabria said), creating the (now-gutted) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a tax on stock trades to stop risky speculation (because speculation “is good”), a tax credit for first-time homebuyers, limits on the pay of executives at banks bailed out by taxpayers, new workplace protections, federal foreclosure assistance to state governments, and a ban on short selling, to name a few.

Sometimes these rested on purely ideological justifications, as when he suggested that limiting how much credit card providers could charge on interest could be a step toward authoritarianism, or his frequent argument against cramdown and other ideas on the basis of “the need to respect contracts.” During the pandemic, as head of the FHFA, Calabria strongly resisted letting Fannie and Freddie put federal money into the mortgage market to stave off a crisis, since it would jeopardize his goal of privatizing the two entities, though he ultimately relented. With worries that a recession could hit the US economy in the coming months and years, these stances may be especially relevant.

Calabria’s appointment may be celebrated by at least one faction of the broad Democratic coalition: the combination of tech funders and pundits behind the Abundance movement.

Calabria first warned during the recession that there was too much housing, and that stimulating more building would reinflate the housing bubble that burst in 2008 — in that case, to argue against financial support for homebuyers. Today he’s a major proponent of deregulation, but for the sake of now juicing up supply to bring down prices — to argue, again, against homebuyer assistance as well as other measures to ensure government-supported affordable housing.

Other OMB appointees similarly point to a similar economic direction for the administration. Anne DeCesaro, who has been made the OMB’s associate director for education, income maintenance, and labor, spent years as a congressional staffer working on initiatives to move people off of welfare programs, particularly through work requirements.

A model for DeCesaro’s work is Bill Clinton’s disastrous 1996 welfare reform. While serving as staff director for the House Ways and Means Committee in 2016, DeCesaro said she and others on the committee were looking to “not only apply the lessons of TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Clinton’s welfare reform], but to reapply them to the larger safety net across the programs,” in particular by making “work in exchange for benefits, preparing for work, doing something” a “big part of what should be a basis for” them. But work requirements have a consistently poor track record of boosting employment, since most people on benefits are already working, and mostly end up creating a bramble of wasteful red tape between the working and disabled Americans who desperately need help.

Nevertheless, DeCesaro has followed through on trying to make this the norm. Over 2015, she was the lead staffer on the House Agriculture Committee’s subcommittee on nutrition’s review of food stamps, or SNAP, during its then Republican-led review of the program. Central to the report that came out of the two-year-long review were calls for “promoting pathways to employment,” “better enforcement of work requirements,” greater detection of fraud and errors, and using SNAP benefits to prod recipients into “healthy eating habits.”

The actual bills she helped produced as a congressional staffer were relatively benign, like one that never passed but would have paid wage subsidies to employers to hire welfare recipients. Her time at Trump’s agriculture department (USDA) was less so. While DeCesaro was chief of staff and director of policy and regulations for the USDA office responsible for administering the SNAP program, it was repeatedly caught up in controversy. First, in December 2019, the USDA finalized three rule changes to SNAP, including one imposing stricter work requirements, that according to one study would have led to more than two million fewer households getting the benefit and more than three million see theirs reduced.

Those changes had been first proposed before DeCesaro had come on board, but the department kept on pursuing them with her in place, even after the pandemic hit and sharply raised hunger. That December, she explained the changes at a conference event held by the Secretaries’ Innovation Group (SIG), an oligarch-funded membership organization of right-wing state officials responsible for welfare programs. SIG’s founding chair was the scandal–plagued Department of Children and Families secretary under Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, which produced some of the ideas later recycled in Walker’s harsh welfare cuts. The organization described DeCesaro as “a SIG friend and colleague.”

While the USDA made some worthwhile expansions to SNAP with the pandemic in mind while DeCesaro was there, even some of those had issues. Allowing the use of SNAP benefits to buy groceries online exposed beneficiaries to data collection and surveillance that saw the companies target low-income Americans and people of color with less healthy food options. Other pandemic-era expansions to SNAP enacted by Congress were hobbled by an inefficient bureaucratic process standing between Americans and the benefits, or by a deliberately restrictive interpretation of the law.

A number of appointees suggest not just a firmly noneconomically populist policy direction at the OMB, but involve the kind of classic Washington revolving door examples Trump in theory campaigned against.

Installed as the OMB’s associate director of health, for instance, is Don Dempsey, fresh off a stint as vice president of policy and research at the Better Medicare Alliance (BMA). The BMA is a lobbying group that represents the private insurers that have treated the semi-privatized Medicare Advantage program as a virtual get-rich-quick scheme, often through outright fraud. Among its “ally organizations” are UnitedHealth Group, Humana, and Aetna (owned by CVS since 2018), which also happen to hold the first-, second-, and fourth-largest enrollment in Medicare Advantage, or just under 60 percent.

The BMA’s raison d’être is doing everything possible to make sure taxpayer money keeps flowing to these insurance giants through the program. During Dempsey’s tenure, it put out polls and studies warning about the negative impacts of lower federal payments into Medicare Advantage, lobbied on more than a dozen bills, defended the harmful and sometimes deadly practice of “prior authorization,” and waged a pressure campaign against regulations and for higher government rates. Dempsey’s short time at the White House has already seen a boon for private insurers, with the Trump administration announcing a major pay boost to Medicare Advantage — $4 billion larger than what Biden had put forward.

Dempsey’s ties to the health care industry go deep. Before the BMA, he led the Washington office of the Marwood Group, a Capitol Hill revolving door firm whose politically connected team helped health care firms and other corporate clients “understand and evaluate risks and opportunities” of legislation and changes to health care regulations. Before that, he worked on policy and regulatory affairs for CVS, at one point serving on a working group on Trump’s drug policies that opposed having the Food and Drug Administration intervene on prices for medicine. And before that, he was a lobbyist for health care companies who worked on, among other things, Medicare coverage and reimbursements, as well as payments to Medicare Advantage.

The appointment of Daniel Kowalski as executive associate director of the OMB further suggests an ongoing policy of austerity. Kowalski described himself as “being the chief number-cruncher” on budget resolutions put out by the House Budget Committee from 1998 to 2007, working under some of the GOP’s key austerians, John Kasich and Paul Ryan, whose proposed harsh spending cuts and wholesale elimination of departments and agencies were a preview of what has happened under the Department of Government Efficiency. He was one of the leading minds behind Senate Republicans’ supposed balanced budget proposal in 2015, which repealed Obamacare and made steep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and other benefits to the tune of $4.2 trillion over a decade — all while not actually balancing the budget.

Immediately prior to joining the OMB, Kowalski was a senior fellow at Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, where he wrote articles advocating for the policies you might expect: repealing Biden’s green energy subsidies, getting rid of DEI, and cementing strict spending limits as permanent features of spending bills. But it’s Kowalski’s tenure in the first Trump term that may be most interesting.

As counselor to the secretary of the Treasury in Trump’s first term, Kowalski spearheaded and relentlessly promoted the Opportunity Zone program, to the point of being named in both 2019 and 2020 a “Top 5 OZ Influencer” by Opportunity Zone Magazine, while he was still in government. OZs, as they are known, were a tax carveout in Trump’s 2017 tax bill that let investors delay paying capital gains taxes on stocks and other assets by putting the resulting profits into certain low-income areas and then avoiding paying federal taxes on any profits they made on that, too.

A Big Tech–originating idea to give a leg-up to underserved communities, the reality was very different: the beneficiaries were overwhelmingly rich, some of the designated “opportunity zones” weren’t low-income at all, and the projects they incentivized trended toward luxury hotels, high-end apartments, and other projects with limited to no community benefits, since there were no real rules or conditions on the tax break. Sometimes they even benefited projects already being built before the 2017 bill passed.

They also opened the door to graft, which Kowalski himself was accused of facilitating: first, while writing the OZ regulations, meeting to discuss the policy with a former casino magnate who had been forced by a sexual misconduct scandal to sell his stake in a luxury hotel business, and who stood to potentially cut his tax bill for the sale thanks to Kowalski’s work; then later, by working with the think tank of notorious Wall Street fraudster Michael Milken to write the rules for OZs, which the disgraced financier conveniently already held real estate investments in.

Once the rules were in place and Kowalski was out of government, he quickly capitalized on his own program. He started a consultancy, Wizard of OZ, helping firms take advantage of the tax break, while sitting on the executive advisory board of Belepointe LLC, which pairs investors with potentially lucrative real estate investments in OZs.

Another revolving-door pick is the OMB’s associate director for natural resources, energy, science, and water, Stuart Levenbach. Levenbach is probably best known for, while serving in Trump’s first administration, stepping in to try and tamp down scientists’ alarming findings for the 2018 National Climate Assessment, a quadrennial government report on how climate change is impacting the country meant to drive future policy decisions. One of the scientists who worked on the report said he “tried to slow it down to the point of it not coming out.”

Levenbach might be another pick that quietly overlaps with the goals of the Abundance movement. Like them, he has complained about how long the permitting process takes, all in the context of approving supposedly climate-friendly projects, and has called for a “comprehensive review of the federal and state regulations necessary to construct clean energy infrastructure.” It was purely motivated by wanting to build more green infrastructure, he wrote — though the only two he cites are hydrogen power and carbon capture, both of them dubious climate solutions the fossil fuel industry has pushed to delay progress on renewables.

Having spent four years at the fossil fuel technology firm Baker Hughes, Levenbach can be thought as the leftmost pole of the fossil fuel sector: he advocated for technological tweaks that would lower methane emissions, for instance, but not phasing out the use of methane altogether.

In fact, when Levenbach represented Baker Hughes on a teleconference about proposed Environmental Protection Agency emissions guidelines in 2023, the firms’ submission made clear that “our goal is to ensure that natural gas continues to play a valuable role in the clean energy transition,” and asserted that it “is helping achieve the world’s carbon-reduction goals. (Studies beg to differ.)

Finally, despite Fox Kennedy’s appointment, other national security appointments at OMB trend toward the more hawkish, revolving-door side of things.

Take associate director for defense Thomas Williams, whose claim to fame in Trump’s first term was helping create the US Space Force and reactivating the US Space Command. Not long after, Williams went on to lead federal sales at aerospace firm Astra, which then proceeded to win several lucrative contracts from both the Space Force and Pentagon more generally.

Williams’s earlier experience hints at a more interventionist foreign policy. He worked for the Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by a hawkish former defense secretary that worked for major defense firms, and was a research assistant for the hawkish ex-national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, at the equally hawkish (and military contractor-funded) Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

He is sympatico with associate director for homeland security Brian Cavanaugh. Until joining the administration, Cavanaugh was on the advisory board for the Vandenberg Coalition, a network of dozens of national security thinkers and former officials bringing together both pro- and anti-Trump voices to push its foreign policy vision onto elected officials, other policymakers, and the public. That vision is decidedly hawkish and interventionist: its chairman is war criminal Elliott Abrams, who introduced the coalition as a way to ensure the GOP maintains a foreign policy that rejects “isolationism” and pursues military supremacy.

It’s the hawkish part of that equation that has mostly been Cavanaugh’s bread and butter. He has urged a more confrontational posture toward China that overlaps with Trump’s predecessor — he praised Biden’s CHIPS Act as he called for a more intense technological decoupling from the country, including “an expanded Zero China Chips policy” — but that has also veered into alarmism: he has called the 2023 Chinese spy balloon fiasco part of a series of “Chinese attacks against our homeland,” for instance, a definition that he also counts fentanyl and mobile apps as being a part of.

This happens to line up with Cavanaugh’s pre-Trump money-making gig, as senior vice president at American Global Strategies (AGS), a consulting firm that advises defense sector firms in particular on how to navigate the kinds of challenges created by the very foreign policy he advocates. While officially, vocally backing any and all Trump policy — the floated annexation of Greenland, for instance — AGS also vows to provide “technology firms with the knowledge and information they required to operate at the cutting edge of US-China technology competition,” and help them deal with “the geopolitical strains on supply chains,” particularly around semiconductors.

Cavanaugh has repeatedly warned about the danger of Chinese cyberattacks on US infrastructure, including baselessly speculating that the several cases of ships colliding into bridges were caused by enemy hacking, and has similarly talked about the need to deploy a defense against hypothetical foreign drones on US soil, possibly hinting at what he may focus on while in government. More alarmingly, besides railing against DEI and supposed election-rigging efforts at the Department of Homeland Security, he has also called for a new nuclear arms race that would see the United States increase its number of nuclear weapons, particularly its collection of “low-yield” nukes.

As Vought’s OMB more fully takes on its role as the engine of Trump’s presidency, this list of appointees hints at some of the competing interests vying for influence within the motley Trump movement. But it also suggests that it is still dominated by the typical coalition of right-wing interests that this movement was supposed to have defeated, from war hawks and corporate lobbyists, to hardcore social conservatives and austerity enthusiasts eager to help the rich and eviscerate the working class.

It’s yet further proof that, while somewhat broadening the Republican tent, Trump has transformed the GOP far less than it has transformed him.