The president is trying to destroy the oldest and one of the most esteemed universities in the country. He wants to make it impossible for foreign students, whose full tuitions help fund universities, to study here. He ignores Congress and lets the folks who created Project 2025 hand him executive orders to sign. The president isn’t tearing down the walls of the Constitution by himself. No coup is possible by a single individual.

In the middle of all this destruction, a letter arrived in my inbox from one of our U.S. senators. He was touting the House bill that will cut Medicaid by $700 billion. He didn’t mention the dollar amount or the cuts to SNAP. “Our focus,” he wrote, “has been on reducing spending and tackling our national debt.”

The tax cuts the senator supports extending increased the deficit during Trump’s first term. Renewing the cuts will certainly not reduce the debt.

As for fraud, research from the KFF’s health policy research division found that fraud occurs in Medicare and Medicaid mostly by providers. Remember the Columbia/HCA case? The Justice Department found the company, whose CEO at the time was Rick Scott, guilty on 14 counts of fraud and fined the company $1.7 billion. Scott currently represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. I have to wonder if he’s weighed in on the fraud and waste discussion.

What happens to people to can’t afford healthcare? What happens to the people who need treatment and medicine in order to keep working?

Not all jobs offer insurance or pay enough for low-income workers to buy insurance for themselves, but of course, senator, keep talking about the people who are defrauding the government by accessing something they qualified for. Who will make up the loss in Medicaid dollars to rural hospitals?

What he didn’t talk about were some of the dead-of-night additions to the 1,000-plus page bill. If he can’t talk honestly about the things we can see, what is he not telling us?

One more thing: Immigrants, as well as foreign students, contribute to our economy. According to the Oklahoma Policy Institute, “undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal, state, and local taxes.” The IRS provides individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers so people who aren’t eligible for a Social Security Number can “comply with U.S. tax law.” You heard that right: They have to pay into Social Security but they are ineligible to draw Social Security.

Providing tax breaks to the people who earn the most, denying foreign students the ability to study in American universities, and deporting people who work and contribute to the economy and Social Security Fund is not how we will reduce the deficit. It’s certainly not making America a better country. And accepting a 13-year-old, $400 million gift that needs to be refurbished with our tax dollars, and which the president plans to take with him when he leaves office, if he leaves office, sounds like both fraud and waste to me.

If only the administration did as much good for this country as the immigrants and foreign students do. Wouldn’t that be great!