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The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

The upcoming big anniversary provides the perfect occasion to insist on the most basic of American messages: that democracy is how we rule ourselves, not kingship.

July 4, 2025

The United States of America is turning 250 in 2026, and that occasion was the subject of my most recent commentary. My concern there was the bigger picture – how to think about this anniversary from a human rights perspective as part of a tapestry of other anniversaries that reveal different aspects of what it means to be American today, and that illuminate the choice about America’s identity and place in the world that is currently so contested. It bodes well for American democracy that  showed up for the No Kings protests on June 14. There is no better illustration of how distinctly alive this contestation is right now. The upcoming big anniversary provides the perfect occasion to insist on the most basic of American messages: that democracy is how we rule ourselves, not kingship.

The anniversary merits another commentary, about a number of specific human rights concerns under whose shadow we enter the year leading up to the big anniversary. I address three topics: human rights concerns about how we care for society’s most vulnerable; about how we prepare for the future; and (very briefly here) how we care for human rights in the rest of the world. Some but not all of this turns on provisions in the major budget reconciliation bill signed on July 4. (While its former name is still in circulation,  this bill is now officially called "An Act to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14"; so there no longer is any aesthetics vocabulary in the name.) But other significant events also occurred on that same day, altogether making July 4, 2025, an exceptionally bad day from a human rights perspective.

Universal health coverage seems to be a political impossibility in the world’s wealthiest country.

How We Care for Society’s Most Vulnerable

The part about how the bill lets down society’s most vulnerable is most visible in media coverage. It makes permanent the tax cuts implemented during the first Trump administration. To make up for lost revenue the bill cuts down on Medicaid (governmental health insurance for the poor) and food stamps (food subsidies for the poor). As everyone who navigates any aspect of it experiences, America’s health care sector – roughly one sixth of the economy – is frustratingly complicated.  Universal health coverage seems to be a political impossibility in the world’s wealthiest country. And yet it is hard to think of anything else that is so clearly demanded by decency and humaneness (not to mention human rights standards), or of anything else that is simultaneously so clearly an investment in the capacities of one’s own people. It is treated as such . Life just does not work out well for many people under any given set of rules – a plain truth the fortunate ones among us .

Over time a complex system of state and federal funding has emerged and could have been further expanded to at least approximate universal coverage. But we are going into the opposite direction. An assessment of the version of the bill that was ultimately approved by both chambers with slight amendments estimates that  through a variety of cuts and addition of bureaucratic hurdles within this complex system. As analyses of the various drafts leading up to its final version pointed out, this legislation .

To be clear: these cuts cannot be justified because they help with the budget deficit. The bill does the opposite,  (The rest of the world might well take the occasion to think about how to make do without the U.S. in the long run if current trends continue.) It seems  support a different assessment.

The bill passed the Senate only because of a tie-breaking vote by the Vice President. As Vance  for him this bill was all about the increased funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The minutiae of the Medicaid policy,” he said, were “immaterial” in comparison – even though Trump had  Medicaid would not be cut, as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis  before his refusal to fall in line with the bill . To Vance, illegal immigration has seemed to be the key problem . Many people will sensibly find comfort in the thought that “the worst of the worst” who can legally be deported will be deported. (Note right away that that is not .) Moreover, an overall policy outlook focused on the fear that these people are among us and are the root of all social evil has advantages of simplicity over industrial policy, housing policy, labor-market policy, educational policy, policies regarding the social safety net, etc. These are all domains that are inherently difficult to get right. But it is thoughtful, evidence-based policies in those domains that we need to make life better for people, instead of setting them up for another crude awakening.

Of course, some immigrants commit crimes, including heinous ones. But since the 19^th century, , both legal and illegal (undocumented) immigrants have had a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. (Also see  and .) This might come as a surprise depending on what news outlets one follows, and there’s different theories as to why it would be so (turning on who migrates, why they do it, etc.) To be sure, undocumented immigrants have broken the law by entering the country, well, illegally. But those who are otherwise law-abiding have thereby made clear that they came to live better lives and thus for the same reason ancestors of many native-born Americans did. They often come from countries whose political and economies are closely intertwined with that of the U.S. (as I explain more in my most recent piece). Undocumented Immigrants , and more .  Deporting millions of undocumented workers would  by $1.1 to $1.7 trillion, it has been estimated, a more devastating contraction than the 2008 financial crisis.

Very visible cruelty might turn America into a country where cruelty is the policy of choice.

Under such circumstances to put so much policy emphasis on deportations seems irrational. , , ,  so that they are not taken in front of loved ones also is exceptionally cruel and disproportionate as punishment just for entering illegally. This is true especially for people who have been here a long time and came from profoundly troubled places. These are often people who have built modest lives here and have nothing to go back to.

Such very visible cruelty might turn America into a country where cruelty is the policy of choice. The intended growth of ICE in the new bill means there will be thousands more agents whose work routinely includes inflicting such cruelty on people whose only violation is not to have the right papers. As I have argued elsewhere, among its characteristics is this administration’s willingness to deploy aggression against vulnerable people, and its apparent joy in doing so. They will now hire a lot more people to do this kind of thing, paying them a bonus of $10,000 per year to make it easier on them. That news comes amid the  on the politicization of the FBI for the MAGA agenda. Redirection of highly trained FBI agents away from cybercrime, domestic terrorism, corporate corruption, organized crime, etc. towards deportations is reported to be part of this project. We should worry profoundly about where this takes our security agencies.

The government presumably understands how unpopular systematic deportation of law-abiding undocumented people is. After all, these measures will affect large parts of the population one way or another. Moreover, human beings, much to their credit, often condemn cruelty unless there is a good reason for it. That might be why the government gives us inflated numbers.  the Vice President claimed that, under Biden, a stupendous number of between 12 and 20 million people entered illegally. (Yes, he was talking about just the people who entered 2021-2024). He thought the number was closer to 20 million. This would also mean a considerable share of undocumented immigrants only arrived quite recently and so deporting them would not be hugely disruptive.

There are some difficulties in counting undocumented immigrants, to be sure. But this has been an important political issue for a long time, and so there’s considerable expertise in this domain. There just does not seem to be credible sources for Vance’s numbers anywhere. Fact-checking inquiries to him on where he gets his numbers from  even though he has worked with these numbers repeatedly. Twenty million is well above the higher estimates of how many undocumented immigrants are in the U.S. altogether, which includes many, many who have been here for decades.

This appears to be yet another instance of gaslighting: Biden is accused of undermining community by permitting a veritable “invasion” of illegals when in fact the threat to the community comes from a massive increase in public cruelty. And for these efforts the new budget bill just provided considerable funds.

How We Prepare for the Future

Beyond the signing of that bill other things too happened on July 4. Southern Texas saw a  which, along the shores of the Guadalupe River north of San Antonio, killed dozens and dozens in a massive flash flood, among them many children. In light of the magnitude of harm and pain that just occurred there it will be difficult to put this event into the right political context. Those who wish to ignore climate change will talk about an extraordinary weather event and accuse those who do want to discuss the climate of sinister motives. Among the most vexing features of climate change as a policy problem is that it is impossible to argue for any specific event that it definitely is a symptom of climate change. But an increase of extreme precipitation events is a . If you watch the news, you see that this kind of thing regularly dominates news coverage around the world. And then there are the fires, the storms, floods from sources other than extreme rainfall, the heatwaves, the droughts, the crop failures, etc.

A safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is necessary for full enjoyment of a broad range of human rights.

Once that rain in Texas was falling, it is hard to imagine what could have been done to save the people who slept in the places where the water needed to come through. But good governance today just is about mitigating and adapting to climate change. We are well past a stage of the climate debate where there is any serious doubt about the reality of climate change. Moreover, the nature of the problem just makes it callous to count on the ingenuity of future generations to deal with the mess we leave, or to think they might not mind natural disasters as much as we do. Yet the U.S. is failing to provide such governance in this domain.

For decades, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has   of probabilities of various precipitation events. In recent months,  at the agency and at the National Weather Service, which sits within NOAA. The administration has  who had been compiling the next National Climate Assessment, scheduled to appear in 2028. It wants to eliminate the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which conducts and coordinates climate research. The president also , the Federal Emergency Management Agency, though the Texas flood is a paradigmatic example of what FEMA is for. And .

The environmental rollbacks extend much further. “Clean energy,” “climate crisis,” “climate science:” these are all  the Trump administration counts as “woke” initiatives and bans on such grounds. The budget bill  for purchasing electric vehicles and efficient appliances. It phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy. The bill restarts leasing of federal land for new oil and gas projects (or coal mines).  to conduct dozens of auctions of offshore oil and gas leases in the “Gulf of America.”  Zero Lab at Princeton University has estimated that the legislation will increase America’s carbon dioxide emissions by 500m tonnes in 2030 (roughly 10% more than without this bill).

The American economy – blue states and especially red states – had started to embrace clean energy . As a Yale newsletter regarding climate matters recently had it:   So they did. As did the House, ending a kind of economic opportunity that . It was all signed into a law on July 4, the same day as the devastating floods in Texas.

The connections between the human rights framework and the climate crisis have become increasingly obvious over time, and the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, . Millions are displaced each year by climate-related calamities. Roughly half of the global population experience severe lack of water for at least part of the year, and climate change greatly reduces food security. Heat- and pollution-related deaths are increasing, and rising temperatures heighten risks of extinction or ecosystem collapse. The UN has increasingly recognized that human rights and environment are interdependent.

A safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is necessary for full enjoyment of a broad range of human rights, including rights to life, health, food, water, and development. After all, human life as we know it unfolds as part of a natural environment. Conversely, human rights, including rights to information, participation, and remedy, are vital to protecting the environment. There will always be special interests eager to exploit nature. This is contrary to the interests of many others. But for them to be informed, organized, and able to act politically to defend the environment, they need human rights. Accordingly, in 2022 the UN . This seems to be of little interest to the current administration.

Funding cuts for organizations that promote democracy and human rights internationally have become victims of Elon Musk’s work on “governmental efficiency.” Human rights ave been sidelined in foreign policy.

How We Care for Human Rights in the Rest of the World

Let me turn to one last topic, just briefly: how the U.S. attends to human rights matters elsewhere in the world. (But on foreign policy, see also here and here.) Just hours after a phone call between the American and the Russian president on July 4, Russian missiles and drones assaulted Kyiv in an overnight attack. This was the largest aerial attack on Ukraine’s capital since the invasion of 2022. Days earlier the White House  it has halted critical weapons deliveries to Ukraine. , former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned that “this will only embolden Russia to continue its war.” It did not take long. Putin chose July 4 to launch this attack. Overall during the second Trump administration, the way the U.S. government has handled sanctions against Russia is  Russia.

Meanwhile the official death toll in Gaza has risen to more than 55,000, . This is happening on our watch.

Most of the “top 10 international crises the world cannot ignore in 2025” () play no role at all in American foreign policy. This is short-sighted. Even though America has oceans on two sides, Americans go everywhere, and American business is everywhere. As of July 1, as Secretary of State triumphantly  USAID ceased to implement American foreign assistance, having seen most of its operations terminated. A study in  found that the USAID funding cuts could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030. Nearly a third of those deaths are expected to be children under 5.

That America’s image  should come as no surprise. A decline in real soft power is a decline in the ability to get things done in the world by actually being liked. On July 1, more than 80 groups  to FIFA expressing "deep concern" over immigration policies that could impact teams and spectators at the event next summer.  for organizations that promote democracy and human rights internationally have become victims of Elon Musk’s work on “governmental efficiency.” Human rights  in foreign policy. (Also see  and  and .)

For now the U.S. remains in NATO, but that seems to depend on NATO leaders keeping the American president happy . New German Chancellor Friedrich Merz turned from winning an election partly on being a debt hawk to being willing to incur dramatic increases in public debt in response to rumors that Trump  while Russia is already waging war in Eastern Europe. When Merz visited the White House on June 5, he spoke “,” presumably to avoid the fate of colleagues  and  in the same location. Merz might also just have been lucky that Trump mostly wanted to talk about Musk that day.

It also bears mentioning that our friends in Greenland  that they do not wish to be annexed, and that our friends in Canada are now looking at the U.S. as the place that plans to weaken them economically in order to annex them later. (Also see .) As  the U.S. used to hold power “derived from a reliable trade network, with logistical chains that were the wonders of the world, combined with a huge alliance network, and the greatest scientific and technological institutes in the world. It is systematically destroying all of those strengths far more thoroughly than any enemy could.”

Yes. We badly need to do better. July 4, 2025, was a really bad day from a human rights perspective. And that’s just one day.

A Concluding Question, Independently of Human Rights Issues: What’s Actually Conservative About That Bill?

Health care coverage is a profoundly conservative position. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck – from a very different era than Merz – started it, back in the 19^th century. Nobody would accuse him of wokism or call him a Marxist. Bismarck thought the modern state should take care of its people. Attending to people this way is also distinctly Christian. There is nothing conservative about inflicting cruelty on undocumented people either, especially if that is their only violation. Such cruelty is not a Christian position. (See here and here.) If anything is worth “conserving,” surely planetary health is, for the sake of this generation and those to come. Anyone who believes the earth was given to humans for sustenance should see that this includes an obligation to leave the earth in a way that does not saddle future people with too much calamity.

And we can be sure Ronald Reagan would not approve of the current dismantling of the international order in which postwar America was so invested, and certainly not of current priorities around Russia and Ukraine. Nobody would accuse him of being a communist or wokist. So what kind of conservative is happy with the “Act to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14"? The bill passed because of Trump’s will power. But we can still ask: what conservative political philosophy, if any, supports it? 

One debatable answer is: libertarians. That would mean people like Thomas Massie in the House or Rand Paul in the Senate. But for one thing, libertarianism is a version of conservatism that is really hard to square with the Declaration of Independence, with its talk not just of liberty, but also of equality and the sharing of fortunes (see also here). More importantly, for our purposes: they voted against because of the enormous increase in public debt. That leaves viewpoints like Vance’s who think something in this bill is just so important that everything else thereby is bearable: national security is so badly at risk due to invaders from south of the border that we must put up with all of this. But we have not detected a non-gaslighting way of arguing for this position.

So, question: Is there actually a conservative stance that makes sense of this bill that somebody could defend without avoiding the question, practicing whataboutism, calling people who are basically garden-variety European-style social democrats wokists, Marxists, communists, left-wing radicals, nutcases, or extremists, otherwise changing topics or raising questions instead of answering them – and first of all without gaslighting?  

Mathias Risse, Faculty Director, Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights