Elon Musk is cutting federal spending, but women will end up paying the price.
The putative head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is laying off tens of thousands of federal workers who help Americans obtain special education services for their children, sign up for health insurance, find financial aid for college, file their taxes and enroll in Social Security, among other things.
This is being presented as a way to trim the federal budget, but it’s really just shifting the burden to America’s mothers, sisters and daughters, who will have to help their families cover the gap.
In my research as a sociologist, I found that the United States has long relied on women’s unpaid labor as a social safety net, especially during times of crisis.
World War II is a great example. Yes, men were off fighting fascism on the battlefield. But that left women doing double- or triple-duty at home: caring for their children and their parents, planting victory gardens and running scrap drives, while also filling the factory jobs men had left behind.
When the war was over, American policymakers abandoned women. Unlike their European allies, who strengthened their social welfare programs after the war, the United States ended the childcare centers Congress had started, let businesses reinstate bans on employment for mothers and married women, and worked with the media and medicine to gaslight women, calling them “crazy” or even questioning whether they were “real” women if they didn’t want to abandon their new jobs to the men returning home.
More recently, women were called on to keep the country running during the Covid pandemic.
When everything shut down in 2020, women bore the brunt of the job cuts and — as I found in my research with families across the country — became the default caregivers at home. Women made sure that children were cared for in the absence of in-person schooling and childcare centers, that elderly family members got their medications, that their families maintained ties with friends and neighbors, that colleagues and clients had someone to turn to for emotional support and even that the men in their households wore masks and washed their hands.
When it was over, policymakers abandoned women.
And again, when it was over, policymakers abandoned women. They could have enacted President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which would have used higher taxes on billionaires and big corporations to fund child tax credits; lower health care costs; ensure universal access to affordable, high-quality preschool, childcare and eldercare; and provide more support for the people — disproportionately women — providing that care. Instead, billionaires and big corporations killed the bill, forcing women to take care of those left sicker, sadder and more stressed than they could have otherwise been.
The difference this time is that the emergency is of our own making. The powers that be are again banking on women, betting that they will stretch themselves thin to keep their families and communities from falling into the holes they are slashing in the safety net. They’re assuming that women will step in to support children who lose access to childcare or special education services, to care for aging parents who can longer rely on Social Security, to rework the family budget and figure out how to keep food on the table and in their kids’ lunch boxes, to weigh the risks of what they feed their families, to look for new doctors as their current ones flee to New Zealand, to provide emotional support for partners who’ve lost their jobs, to put their own careers and financial security on hold to stay home when their little ones get sick with measles and to navigate complex bureaucracies such as the federal financial aid system to help their families access what little support the government continues to provide. But there’s no national emergency. We aren’t at war with a foreign power or dealing with a global pandemic. All this cost-cutting is being done so that libertarians can achieve long-held dreams of a DIY society, billionaires can get a tax cut and President Trump can avoid prosecution while getting revenge on his perceived enemies. So, rather than stretch themselves past their breaking points, I wouldn’t be surprised if this time, women in the U.S. take another page from history’s playbook and declare — like women in Iceland did 50 years ago — that they’re going on strike.
Jessica Calarco
Dr. Jessica Calarco is a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of "Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net." 
