The White House will announce Friday a list of “socialist” federal programs targeted for massive cuts, Trump declared in remarks Tuesday. The would-be dictator did not elaborate, but clearly further massive cuts are being planned for New Deal and Great Society-era programs of the 1930s and 1960s such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, on which tens of millions rely.

“We’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we were opposed to,” Trump said in comments to the press. “And they’re never going to come back in many cases.” He reiterated that he would go after “the most egregious, socialist, semi- communist, probably not full communist,” programs and added that his administration could “do things that we were unable to do before.”

These statements underscore that the Trump White House is seizing upon the government shutdown, now at the start of its third week, to accelerate a social counter-revolution long in the works.

The roughly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other social programs contained in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” passed during the summer is only a down payment for what is to come. Trillions of cuts at the expense of the working class will be redirected to prop up a teetering financial system, further enrich the oligarchy and fund a massive military buildup to prepare for war with China.

The ruling class is working with a definite timetable. A leak from the spy agencies of the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand pointed to the development of a new command and control system for all-out war against China, which will come online as soon as 2027.

Already, over 4,000 jobs have been targeted in the initial “reductions in force” (RIFs) begun last Friday, with some of the largest cuts taking place at the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Education.

In the manner of a Mafia boss, on Sunday Vice President JD Vance told Fox News, “The longer this [the shutdown] goes on, the deeper the cuts are going to be … To be clear, some of these cuts are going to be painful.”

Trump is also using the shutdown to continue to build the framework for dictatorship, by seizing control over spending from Congress and establishing the unilateral power of the executive branch, in line with the authoritarian “unitary executive” theory advocated by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) head Russ Vought.

One way Trump is doing this is by firing all employees who administer a program, rendering it virtually inoperative. There have been hundreds of layoffs at the Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which administers programs targeting special needs students, including those with disabilities, homeless students and the children of migrants. “We are emphasizing the law is intact, the funding is intact, and we don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow,” one nonprofit director was quoted as saying by Edsource.

SAMHSA, an agency focused on mental health and addiction which administers the national 988 suicide hotline, was also significantly impacted by Friday’s cuts, according to the Federal News Network.

Federal programs to deal with discrimination or substandard housing have been similarly gutted. “They’ve finally put the nail in the coffin of the Great Society,” one Department of Housing and Urban Development staffer told the Washington Post. “They finally figured out how to do what not even Reagan could.”

In a separate report, the Post said that an internal memo at the Social Security Administration is directing employees to pause “benefit verification letters, which Social Security gives people so they can finalize their eligibility for state benefits such as food stamps; subsidized housing and old-age pensions; and earning corrections, which are issued when someone reports missing income,” as well as interactions with “third parties” such as lawyers and advocacy groups.

Last week, the Trump administration also released a proposal to restrict access to Social Security disability benefits.

This underscores the fact that the chief target of Trump’s ongoing coup attempt is the working class. In response, the working class must mobilize as the central force against fascism, combining the defense of democratic rights with the fight against oligarchy and for workers’ power.

Trump’s attempt to equate the Democrats with “socialist” and even “semi-communist” policies is false. In fact, Democratic administrations enacted these programs many decades ago in order to stave off the threat of revolution. But the Democrats long ago abandoned limited reforms and have been full partners in austerity cuts.

Today, they refuse to state openly what Trump is doing because to do so would invite a mass movement which would inevitably challenge American capitalism. In the corporate media, reporting of Trump’s statements targeting social programs were largely buried.

The union bureaucracy has either refused to mobilize its members or has openly joined Trump. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has only filed a few lawsuits which Trump is simply ignoring. They have not responded to Trump’s comments on their website, as of this writing.

However, Trump’s incessant denunciation of “socialism” and “communism” reflects a ruling class which is gripped with fear of revolutionary upheavals, a principal factor behind Trump’s policies.

One of the only sections of government that is still receiving paychecks during the shutdown is the military. Trump has reallocated $8 billion in defense spending to pay soldiers to ensure their loyalty as hundreds are being deployed to American cities and the White House prepares to invoke the Insurrection Act. The strategy, as summed up by a post from the official OMB X/Twitter account, is “Pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the RIFs, and wait.”

Meanwhile, the economic impact of the shutdown and federal layoffs are beginning to be felt in the working class. “Across the country, food banks are stocking up on provisions and community service organizations are telling at-risk clients to warn their lenders of the potential for missed payments,” says the Washington Post. The New York Times reports that federal layoffs this year have contributed to a surge in unemployment, among African Americans in particular, from 6 to 7.5 percent in four months.

The last paychecks for air traffic controllers were sent out Tuesday, according to the newspaper. Hundreds of thousands of employees working throughout the shutdown may never receive back pay. The OMB speciously claims that specific language in the funding bill is required for this, even though back pay has always been paid out as a matter of course following previous shutdowns. This malicious reinterpretation of the law could set the stage for wage theft on a massive scale, with political motivations underlying the decision of who receives back pay.

The layoffs have also triggered a surge to 154,000 who have retired or accepted buyouts this year. But the processing of benefits has been significantly delayed, ironically, due to manpower shortages at the Office of Personnel Management, the Post reports.

The cuts will also have significant impacts on science and culture. About 550 cuts have been announced at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which operates deep space probes such as the Mars rovers. Washington Monthly also carried a report recently on the implications of the White House selling off historical buildings with classic art deco murals.

The fight against these massive austerity measures must be combined with the fight against dictatorship, war and their source, the capitalist profit system. This fight can only be led by the working class and its fight for equality, including the expropriation of the billionaires who support Trump, the nationalization of the banks and industry, and running society in the interests of human need, not profit. That is the program of socialism.