When you think things are as bad as they can be for the poor and infirm, the GOP finds new ways to make them worse.

From the Herald Leader:

Recently, the White House released the Administration’s proposed FY26 federal budget. The suggested cuts to housing and homeless services are dramatic. The proposed budget would slash the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development by over $32 billion — a 44% cut to agency programs, which would all but eliminate our country’s housing safety net. A small portion of current funding levels would be disbursed to Kentucky in the form of block grants for public housing and rental assistance, and Kentucky would have to pick up the rest of the tab. Programs that effectively build self- sufficiency would be zeroed out, along with funding that Kentucky uses for infrastructure and housing construction.

OK, no shelter, what’s next? This from Public Service News:

A new data dashboard from the Sierra Club showed more Kentuckians would be at risk for higher exposure to air and water pollution if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency follows through on plans to loosen several environmental regulations.

Targets for rollbacks include regional haze, greenhouse gas, mercury and air toxin standards, along with wastewater pollution rules and a recently implemented set of rules designed to curb nitrogen oxide emissions.

Julia Finch, director of the Kentucky chapter of the Sierra Club, said coal plants and industries in the Commonwealth would be allowed to emit more pollution into neighboring communities.

“It’s a divestment from the health of Kentuckians,” Finch argued. “As much as the narrative is out there that rolling back regulations on coal will bring jobs into the area, the fact of the matter is, that there’s just no data to support that.”

Nationwide, the dashboard showed more than 532 million metric tons more carbon dioxide would be emitted, along with more than 2,500 more tons of fine particulate matter and 868 more pounds of mercury if the pollution standards are rolled back.

It gets worse. From Nobel Economics Prize winner Paul Krugman:

On Monday House Republicans released the final parts of their proposed tax and budget bill — and it’s the stuff of nightmares. As Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress documents, the bill would impose the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP — the program formerly known as food stamps — in history. Millions of low-income Americans would lose health coverage; millions would go hungry. Many of those suffering would be children.

The purpose of these cuts, sadism aside, would be to partially offset the cost of huge tax cuts for the rich — cuts that would still explode the budget deficit. The cruelty is mind-boggling. In fact, I have both a suggestion and a prediction for major media organizations: I’d like to see them do focus groups with ordinary voters, describing these plans. My prediction, based on what we’ve seen in the past, is that many voters will simply refuse to believe the policy descriptions, insisting that elected officials can’t possibly be that vicious.

But they can be and are.

If you’re poor or rely on any of the above programs and voted for any Republican because ONE trans athlete MIGHT sign up for a girls’ softball team in a country of 340 million people, or because you believed an illegal South African immigrant ketamine-addicted Space Nazi megabillionaire and his flatulent orange Chia Pet were cutting waste and not stuffing their pockets and the pockets of their oligarch friends with your tax dollars, congratulations! You’re the waste they’re cutting, and you’ve signed a death warrant for you and your loved ones.