30/12/2025
The Structural Squeeze
One of the most damaging effects of the GOP’s current agenda is not just specific policies, but the snowball effect of instability they create. It is a slow erosion that takes the life out of life. When everything feels chaotic, unpredictable, and constantly under threat, people and organizations lose the ability to plan, to dream, to expand, or even to breathe.
This chaos is not accidental. It is produced by an administration and a broader political strategy that thrives on disruption, cuts, and ideological control rather than stability and investment. When policies shift constantly, funding is slashed without replacement, and basic systems are treated as political bargaining chips, the result is a world that becomes smaller, colder, and more transactional.
For businesses that serve people rather than profits alone, this instability is devastating. Planning becomes impossible. Expansion becomes reckless. Even maintaining what already exists feels risky. Over the last five years, many organizations tried to grow, adapt, and meet unmet needs. Now, much of that growth is shrinking, not because the need disappeared, but because the structural support was intentionally pulled away.
Disability services are a clear example. Repeated state cuts, tighter eligibility rules, and reduced reimbursement rates make it impossible to plan for growth or innovation. Offices close. Staff burn out. Community spaces disappear. Services become more clinical and less human. The loss is not just operational, it is relational. Fewer opportunities for connection, joy, and dignity remain.
But this is not limited to disability services.
Small businesses are experiencing the same squeeze. Rising costs, unstable regulations, and the loss of consumer discretionary spending mean fewer bonuses, fewer events, fewer community partnerships. Businesses stop sponsoring local activities. They stop hosting gatherings. They stop investing in people. Survival replaces creativity.
Healthcare is shrinking in similar ways. Preventive care, mental health supports, and community based services are often the first things cut. What remains is crisis driven care, more expensive, more impersonal, and less effective. Providers leave. Patients wait longer. Burnout becomes normalized.
Education and education adjacent industries are also contracting. Enrichment programs, arts, extracurriculars, and supports that make learning meaningful are framed as optional and therefore expendable. Schools and organizations are forced into scarcity thinking, where compliance matters more than growth and curiosity.
The nonprofit sector feels this acutely. Funding becomes unpredictable. Grants shrink or disappear. Organizations are pushed to do more with less until doing anything at all becomes unsustainable. The work becomes about survival rather than impact.
Across all of these sectors, the pattern is the same. When money tightens and systems destabilize, the first things to go are connection, joy, prevention, and community. These are dismissed as extras, even though they are the very things that make life livable.
And when those things disappear, power concentrates. Isolated people are easier to control than connected ones. Exhausted organizations are easier to dismantle than thriving ones. A smaller world with fewer supports creates less collective power, less resistance, and less imagination. That outcome aligns perfectly with the GOP’s broader agenda.
This is why so many people feel tired in a way that rest alone does not fix. It is not just overwork. It is moral exhaustion from trying to build, care, and lead inside systems that are being deliberately starved.
Stepping back in this context is not failure. Shrinking is not laziness. Selling a building, closing a program, or pulling away from community leadership is often an act of self preservation, not surrender. You cannot keep compensating for structural harm without becoming collateral damage yourself.
The tragedy is not that people are choosing smaller lives. The tragedy is that policy has made expansive lives unsustainable.
And that is not an accident. It is the squeeze working exactly as designed.
