U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy joins protesters outside the USAID office blasting Elon Musk's and DOGE's efforts to decimate the agency.
If President Donald Trump follows through on promised tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China, the average American household will lose $1,250 a year in disposable income.
So said Patrick Oakford, a senior fellow at the Yale Budget Lab, a new-ish New Haven think tank that analyzes how federal economic decisions affect the public. He spoke Tuesday in a conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program about what’s at stake with proposed tariffs, budget freezes, and mass deportation plans.
The Budget Lab’s estimate of the impact of tariffs stemmed from the 25 percent tariffs Trump ordered on U.S. allies Mexico and Canada and 10 percent on China starting Tuesday. Trump paused the Mexico and Canada tariffs at the last hour for 30 days. The nations have promised retaliatory tariffs targeting red state-manufactured products.
If the tariffs do take effect, “we know very clearly what the impact will be, right? It will result in an increase in prices for US consumers,” Oakford said, calling the estimated $1,250 “not an insignifcant amount of money. For most Americans, if you were to sit them down and say, ‘All right, where are you going to cut that, that spending?’ That’s not an easy task.”
Meanwhile, plans for mass deportations of immigrants have already begun. Mass deportations “will have a significant drain on our economy, particularly industries that are disproportionately reliable on immigrant labor,” Oakford said. He noted that many undocumented workers pay taxes, money that shores up social security and Medicare, programs from which they don’t benefit.
Another huge impact comes from state plans of the new Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget. Last week the Trump administration temporarily froze $3 trillion in government contracts, grants and loans before a judge ordered a pause while separation-of-powers arguments get argued in court. Since then local governments and social-service agencies and aid recipients have scrambled to figure out what money is in danger long term.
Musk has clearly stated that his goals have less to do with efficiency than “reducing the size of government,” Oakford noted. “He believes that the current manner in which our federal service functions is undemocratic, and he wants to change it” by “fundamentally changing how federal agencies provide services to millions of Americans.”
If Musk succeeds in that quest, Oakford said, that endangers direct day-to-day work done by two million federal workers.
“We know the food that we are purchasing at stores is safe because of the efforts of the Food and Drug Administration along with the CDC [Centers for Disease Control], right? Those agencies help identify when unsafe products have hit shelves [like] E. coli from lettuce. We have confidence in boarding flights and getting in new cars knowing we can reach our destination safely because of standards and inspections and guardrails from federal government right seniors and veterans.
“Musk and DOGE [are] looking to significantly reduce the number of federal workers and make them villains to the American public. They are trying to dismantle the core functions of federal agencies.”
Click on the video below to hear the full conversation with Budget Lab Senior Fellow Patrick Oakford on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”