C. Andrew Doyle

In Washington, a new piece of legislation glides forward on patriotic branding and moral ambition. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as it’s called, promises economic growth, national renewal, and family empowerment. But beneath the shimmering language of prosperity lies a troubling philosophy — one that recasts the U.S. citizen as a market participant above all else and reshapes public policy into a liturgy for the god of the economy. 

Several sections of the bill emphasize that a person’s economic output should be what determines their worth and the benefits they receive for living in the United States. Food assistance under SNAP is now contingent on proving one’s usefulness in the workforce, and access to Medicaid is framed as a reward for monthly productivity. Colleges are penalized based on their graduates’ loan repayment rates, reducing education to a measure of economic return, while student aid is calculated not by need but by the expected value of a student’s future earnings. Even newborns are cast as future market participants, with state-seeded “Trump Accounts” designed to train them in contribution and market value from infancy. These provisions redefine public goods not as a matter of justice or care, but as a transactional reward for economic performance.