Breadlines & Bank Runs: What Happens When DOGE Guts the New Deal
From Breadlines to Billionaires: How Elon’s DOGE Is Unraveling FDR’s New Deal and Dragging Us Back to the Great Depression
1933: The Year America Broke
Picture this: It’s 1933. You’re standing in a breadline in Chicago, stomach growling, watching grown men cry because they can’t feed their families. The bank took your house last month. Your uncle, once a proud factory worker, has disappeared—he hopped a freight train west, chasing rumors of work in California. Your mother is sewing scraps together to make your little brother shoes, because there’s no money for new ones. And your father? He’s pacing in front of the radio, waiting to hear if President Roosevelt has a plan to pull the country out of this nightmare.
The Great Depression wasn’t just a recession—it was an economic collapse that shattered millions of lives. The stock market crash of 1929 wiped out entire fortunes overnight, but it wasn’t just Wall Street fat cats who suffered. Ordinary Americans—farmers, factory workers, teachers, shopkeepers—watched as the economy ground to a halt. The banks failed, unemployment soared to 25%, and there was no safety net. No Social Security. No unemployment benefits. No deposit insurance to keep your life savings safe if your bank collapsed. If you were out of work, you were on your own. And if you lost everything? Well, good luck.
But then, something radical happened. The government stepped in.
FDR’s New Deal: The Government Decides to Give a Damn
Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933 and did something unthinkable: he used the federal government to stabilize the economy and help everyday Americans. And the conservatives of his time lost their minds.
They called it socialism. They called him a dictator. But FDR didn’t care. He had a country to save. Over the next decade, the New Deal rewrote the contract between the American people and their government. It wasn’t just about throwing money at the problem—it was about structural change.
Here’s what FDR did:
→ Social Security Act (1935): Guaranteed retirement income for seniors and disability benefits for workers. (Because maybe people shouldn’t have to starve in their old age?)
→ The Wagner Act (1935): Protected workers’ rights to form unions and collectively bargain. (Because without unions, you get 12-hour shifts, child labor, and starvation wages.)
→ The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) (1933): Insured bank deposits so people wouldn’t lose their life savings if a bank failed. (No more waking up to find out your bank folded and you’re broke.)
→ The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (1934): Regulated Wall Street to prevent the stock market from turning into a casino that could crash the economy. (Looking at you, hedge funds.)
→ The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) (1933): Brought electricity and economic development to rural America. (Because in 1933, parts of the U.S. still didn’t have power!)
→ The Fair Labor Standards Act (1938): Established a minimum wage, overtime pay, and banned child labor. (Radical concept: Workers deserve fair pay and weekends.)
This wasn’t just a Band-Aid—it was a complete redesign of the American economic system. And guess what? It worked.
The New Deal pulled the country back from the abyss. It put people back to work. It stabilized the banking system. It created the social safety nets we still rely on today. And most importantly, it put guardrails on capitalism to make sure the Great Depression never happened again.
But today, the billionaires who run America want those guardrails gone.
2025: Elon’s DOGE Is Dismantling the New Deal
Fast forward to today. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk’s pet agency, is hacking away at the very protections FDR put in place to keep another Depression from happening. And just like in 1933, the people who will suffer the most won’t be the billionaires—it’ll be you.
Here’s what DOGE is up to:
❌ Social Security is on the chopping block. They haven’t killed it yet, but they’re “reviewing” its sustainability (translation: they want to gut it). If you’re under 50, you might never see a dime of the money you paid in.
❌ The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is under attack. Affordable home loans? Not on DOGE’s watch. Mortgage assistance programs are being slashed. Expect another foreclosure crisis.
❌ The FDIC is in danger. DOGE wants to “rethink” deposit insurance. Translation: If your bank fails, you’re on your own.
❌ The TVA is being privatized. Musk’s friends in the energy sector want to take over, meaning higher utility bills for people in the South.
❌ Labor protections are crumbling. DOGE has already killed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and now they’re coming for unions. Think you have the right to bargain for better wages? Not for long.
This isn’t just about cost-cutting. It’s a full-scale rollback of the New Deal. The billionaires who run America don’t want a government that protects you—they want a government that protects them.
Welcome to the Second Gilded Age
What happens when you strip away labor protections, gut Social Security, deregulate banks, and let corporations run wild? You get the Gilded Age 2.0—an America where the rich get richer, workers get squeezed, and the government exists only to serve corporate interests.
This is what DOGE wants. And if we don’t fight back, this is what they’ll get.
FDR once said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." But today, we should be afraid—of losing everything he fought for. Because if we let them take away the New Deal, we might just find ourselves right back in that breadline in 1933.
What Can We Do?
We fight like hell.
We organize. We vote. We call out the billionaires trying to rewrite history. And we remember: The government is supposed to work for us, not for them.
Because the moment we stop fighting, they win.
And if history has taught us anything, it’s that when the rich win every battle, the rest of us lose everything.
Stay loud. Stay furious. Stay American.
Picture this: It’s 2026. Or 2028. You’re hiding in a corner, in an alley, in your basement in Anywhere, America. You’re hungry, almost starving. Your house isn’t your own anymore. You don’t understand. You liked what Trump said. He was going to get rid of the foreigners, the deviants, the non-believers. You voted for him, for Christ’s sake. How could this happen – to you? You were one of his people.
Wait, did you hear that? Got to run, got to find somewhere else to hide.
The better a government program works, the more the TrumpMusk monster wants to break it.