The Collapse of Care: When Services Become Weaponized

If you've listened to this week's episode, you know we talked about the systemic dismantling of care infrastructure happening right now. But there's a darker pattern underneath the budget cuts and layoffs that we need to name explicitly: the deliberate weaponization of social services against the people who provide them and the communities who need them. There is a strategy behind this scarcity. 

The Weaponization Framework: How Austerity Becomes a Tool of Control

When we talk about "weaponizing services," we're describing a multi-stage process that transforms care from a public good into a mechanism of harm. Understanding this framework helps us see that what's happening isn't incompetence or unfortunate necessity—it's design.

Stage 1: Create Dependence While Building Resentment

Social safety net programs are structured to create maximum dependence with minimum dignity. Consider SNAP: the benefit amounts are calculated to keep people fed, but barely. They're enough to make the program essential, but not enough to provide actual food security or allow for the kind of nutrition that prevents chronic disease.

This isn't accidental. Programs designed to provide just enough survival but not enough thriving serve two purposes:

First, they keep people dependent. When you're one missed SNAP payment away from hunger, you can't risk disrupting the system. You can't organize. You can't protest. You become compliant because the alternative is immediate crisis.

Second, they build public resentment. When benefits are structured to be barely adequate, recipients are constantly making visible trade-offs—using SNAP to buy soda, choosing shelf-stable over fresh food, running out of benefits before the month ends. This visible "mismanagement" becomes fodder for narratives about people making "bad choices," which then justifies further restrictions and cuts.

The academic term for this is "administrative burden"—the deliberate construction of bureaucratic obstacles that exhaust, stigmatize, and exclude. Political scientist Pamela Herd and economist Donald Moynihan document how learning costs, compliance costs, and psychological costs are intentionally built into social programs to reduce participation while maintaining the appearance of availability.

Stage 2: Underfund to the Point of Visible Failure

Once dependence is established, the next stage is systematic underfunding calibrated to make programs fail visibly but not catastrophically—at least not immediately.

Look at what happened with the CDC. The agency didn't lose 100% of its staff in one cut. It lost 600 people—enough to cripple disease surveillance and emergency response capacity, but not enough to completely shut down operations. The result? The CDC still exists on paper. It can still be pointed to as "the agency responsible for public health." But it can no longer actually fulfill that responsibility effectively.

This creates what researchers call "hollow state" governance—institutions that exist in name but lack the capacity to perform their stated functions. Political scientist Donald Kettl describes this as the transformation of government from provider to contractor to empty vessel, where the infrastructure remains but the ability to deliver services evaporates.

The genius of this approach is that when the next public health crisis hits and the response is inadequate, the narrative won't be "we defunded the CDC." It will be "the CDC failed us." The agency becomes the scapegoat for the very capacity destruction that was imposed upon it.

Stage 3: Transfer the Burden to Nonprofits (Who Can't Refuse)

When government services become hollow, the need doesn't disappear. It transfers to nonprofits, which operate under a fundamentally different set of constraints that make them perfect shock absorbers for austerity.

Nonprofits face what organizational theorist Paul DiMaggio calls "coercive isomorphism"—they must conform to the demands of their funding sources to survive. When government contracts and grants dry up, nonprofits can't refuse to serve people. Mission-driven work means the gap becomes your responsibility by default.

But here's where it becomes weaponization: nonprofits are expected to fill gaps created by billion-dollar budget cuts with bake sales and small donor campaigns. You're given 30% of what you need and told to "innovate" to cover the rest.

Research from the Urban Institute shows that nonprofit organizations already subsidize government services by an estimated $100 billion annually through below-market compensation and donated volunteer time. When government cuts transfer more work to nonprofits without proportional funding increases, this subsidy grows—essentially forcing nonprofits to underwrite government austerity with their own resources and their workers' wellbeing.

This creates a vicious cycle:

1. Government cuts services
2. Nonprofits absorb the need with inadequate funding
3. Nonprofits burn out staff trying to meet impossible demand
4. High turnover and program instability become visible
5. Critics point to nonprofit "inefficiency" to justify further government withdrawal
6. More burden transfers to nonprofits

At each stage, the failure is attributed to the sector absorbing the shock rather than the policy creating the shock.

Stage 4: Use Worker Burnout as Evidence That Care Doesn't Work

This is perhaps the most insidious stage: when the inevitable burnout and breakdown of care workers becomes "proof" that social services are ineffective.

You see this in education constantly. Teachers are given inadequate resources, oversized classes, contradictory mandates, and poverty-level wages. When they burn out and leave the profession at rates that create chronic shortages, the narrative becomes "teachers aren't committed anymore" or "teaching isn't attracting quality candidates."

The problem—systemic under-resourcing—is reframed as a supply-side issue with workers rather than a policy choice.

Organizational psychologist Christina Maslach, who developed the definitive framework for understanding occupational burnout, has been explicit about this: burnout is not an individual pathology. It's a structural mismatch between the person and six key areas of the workplace—workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.

When we look at social services right now, every single dimension is in crisis:

• Workload: Impossible caseloads after layoffs
• Control: Constant policy shifts beyond worker influence
• Reward: Below-market wages despite advanced degrees
• Community: Support systems destroyed by turnover
• Fairness: Cuts distributed arbitrarily without logic
• Values: Mission undermined by funding priorities

This is structural violence.

And when workers break under these conditions, their departure is used as evidence that "these programs don't work" or "we can't retain talent in government service"—justifying further cuts and privatization.

The Historical Blueprint: How We've Seen This Before

This weaponization framework isn't new. We've watched it play out in real time with other sectors, and the pattern is instructive.

The Postal Service Playbook

The systematic dismantling of the U.S. Postal Service offers a perfect case study. In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required USPS to pre-fund 75 years' worth of retiree health benefits within a 10-year span—a requirement imposed on no other public or private entity.

This manufactured financial crisis accomplished several things simultaneously:

1. Created the appearance of failure: USPS went from profitable to reporting billions in "losses" overnight, despite actually operating at a surplus before the pre-funding mandate
2. Justified service cuts: Post offices closed in rural communities, delivery slowed, workers were laid off—all framed as "necessary cost-cutting" rather than consequences of an artificial constraint
3. Softened ground for privatization: As service deteriorated, narratives emerged about private carriers being more efficient, setting up eventual handover of profitable routes to private companies while USPS retains unprofitable rural delivery mandates
4. Punished workers: Postal workers faced wage freezes, benefit cuts, and speed-ups while being blamed for the institution's "financial troubles"

The blueprint is clear: impose impossible constraints, wait for visible failure, use that failure to justify further cuts, extract the profitable parts for private entities, blame workers for the decline.

The Public Education Slow Death

We're watching the same framework applied to public education, particularly in states that have embraced school voucher programs and charter school expansion.

The pattern:

1. Cut per-pupil funding to public schools while increasing regulation and testing requirements
2. Blame teachers and schools when outcomes deteriorate under impossible conditions
3. Introduce "choice" alternatives (charters, vouchers) that siphon resources from public schools
4. Celebrate private/charter successes that result from selecting motivated families and excluding high-need students
5. Accelerate public school closures in communities now "choosing" alternatives that were designed to outcompete deliberately weakened public options

Researcher Diane Ravitch documents how this process has transformed public education from a universal public good into a market where "choice" means sorting children by parental resources and advocacy capacity.

The weaponization here is particularly cruel because the harm compounds across generations—communities lose neighborhood schools that served as civic anchors, children with high needs concentrate in under-resourced settings, and teachers leave the profession in waves, creating credential shortages that further justify private alternatives.

Healthcare's Ongoing Transformation

We can see early stages of this framework in healthcare, particularly Medicaid. States that refused Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act created coverage gaps that left millions uninsured—then pointed to poor health outcomes in their states as evidence of "government healthcare" failure, despite having deliberately blocked the government healthcare that would have addressed the problem.

The administrative burden framework is particularly visible in Medicaid: complex renewal processes, work requirements, frequent eligibility verification, required in-person appointments. These barriers reduce enrollment (achieving the policy goal of smaller programs) while creating visible "instability" (people cycling on and off coverage) that gets framed as poor program design rather than deliberately constructed obstacle courses.

Research published in Health Affairs found that states imposing Medicaid work requirements saw coverage losses concentrated among people who were already working or had caregiving responsibilities—meaning the requirements didn't increase employment, they just created bureaucratic barriers that caused coverage loss for people who couldn't navigate the paperwork.

The cruelty is the point. The coverage loss is the goal. The bureaucratic maze accomplishes the de facto work of overt denial while maintaining plausible deniability.

The Psychological Warfare Against Care Workers

What makes this weaponization particularly effective is how it operates on the psychology of care workers themselves. If you're reading this and feeling like you should somehow be able to hold it all together—that's part of the weapon.

The Exploitation of Calling

Care work attracts people with a sense of calling—a deep commitment to service that goes beyond transactional employment. This is beautiful and necessary. It's also exploitable.

Research on "vocation" in the workplace shows that while strong calling is associated with job satisfaction, it also predicts tolerance of poor working conditions, wage suppression, and exploitation. People with high calling are more likely to work beyond their contracted hours, accept below-market compensation, and remain in deteriorating conditions because "the work is too important to leave."

Organizational scholars Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton found that while calling can be protective (providing meaning during difficulty), it becomes destructive when organizations leverage it as a substitute for adequate resources. The implicit contract becomes: "Your commitment to the mission should compensate for our refusal to fund the mission adequately."

This is why "self-care" rhetoric can be so infuriating to care workers. You're told to take bubble baths and practice mindfulness while being asked to do the work of three people because two positions were eliminated. The prescription is individual (change yourself) while the problem is structural (we're not funding this work adequately).

The psychological move here is brilliant in its cruelty: it takes your deepest values and uses them to extract labor that will break you, then frames your breaking as evidence of your individual inadequacy rather than systemic violence.

The Isolation Algorithm

Weaponization also relies on isolation—keeping care workers separated so they can't recognize patterns or organize collectively.

Notice how layoffs often happen in waves across different organizations and sectors with slightly different timing. One month it's your AmeriCorps program. Two months later it's the county health department. Three months after that it's the school district. Each feels like an isolated organizational problem rather than a coordinated policy assault.

This fragmentation serves several purposes:

It prevents pattern recognition. When losses are staggered and localized, it's harder to see the systemic nature of what's happening. Each organization thinks it's facing unique challenges rather than being targeted by deliberate policy.

It inhibits collective action. When your organization is in crisis mode, you don't have capacity to organize with other struggling organizations. You're in survival mode, not movement-building mode. By the time you catch your breath, the next wave has hit a different sector, and they're the ones in crisis mode.

It enables divide-and-conquer narratives. When nonprofits compete for shrinking pots of funding, they can't build coalitions. When public sector workers and nonprofit workers are set against each other with slightly different pay scales and benefit structures, they can't organize together. Fragmentation keeps power dispersed.

Sociologist Frances Fox Piven writes about how austerity politics deliberately atomize resistance by creating "scarcity competitions" where potential allies are forced to compete for inadequate resources. The competition itself becomes the barrier to solidarity.

The Moral Injury Mechanism

Perhaps most damaging is how this system creates what's clinically termed "moral injury"—the psychological and spiritual harm that results from participating in, witnessing, or failing to prevent actions that violate deeply held moral beliefs.

Moral injury was first identified in military contexts—soldiers ordered to kill civilians, medics forced to make triage decisions that doom some to death, commanders who must send troops into hopeless situations. But it applies directly to care work under austerity.

When you have to tell a client you can't help them because your program was cut, that's moral injury. When you have to close a case before the person is stable because your caseload is impossible, that's moral injury. When you watch a colleague laid off mid-program with clients in crisis, that's moral injury. When you have to enforce a policy you know is harmful because you'll lose your job if you don't, that's moral injury.

Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who pioneered moral injury research, emphasizes that it's not the same as PTSD. It's not about fear and trauma from threats to your own safety. It's about betrayal—the shattering of your moral framework when institutions force you to violate your own values.

Moral injury is particularly destructive because it attacks your sense of self as a good person doing meaningful work. It creates shame ("I should have found a way to help"), guilt ("I failed that client"), and loss of faith ("Maybe this work doesn't actually matter").

This is the psychological endpoint of weaponization: you internalize the systemic violence and turn it inward, blaming yourself for outcomes created by policy choices far beyond your control.

The Economic Logic: Why Dismantling Care Makes Perfect Sense (To Some)

If this all feels strategically cruel, that's because it is. But there's an economic logic underneath that we need to understand—because knowing the incentives helps us identify pressure points for resistance.

The Privatization Pipeline

Every public service that's systematically weakened creates a market opportunity for private entities. This is sometimes called "starve the beast" strategy—defund public services until they fail, then point to the failure as justification for privatization.

We've watched this with prisons (mass incarceration creating a for-profit prison industry), education (charter schools and vouchers), military services (private contractors replacing soldiers), and infrastructure (toll roads replacing public highways).

The profit potential is massive. Education economist Bruce Baker calculates that public education alone represents a $600+ billion annual market. Healthcare is trillions. Social services collectively represent hundreds of billions in government contracts.

When you systematically weaken public and nonprofit providers, you create opportunities for private companies to enter with promises of "efficiency" and "innovation"—which usually means lower wages, worse benefits, less oversight, and profit extraction.

Research from In the Public Interest documents how privatization typically results in:

• 20-40% lower wages for frontline workers
• Reduced service quality as profit margins require cutting corners
• Less transparency and public accountability
• Higher costs to government due to profit extraction and contract management overhead

But from the perspective of private equity firms and corporate contractors, public sector failure is a business opportunity. Every shuttered public program is a potential revenue stream waiting to be captured.

The Budget Politics Angle

There's also a straightforward ideological component: reducing the size and scope of government has been an explicit political project for decades.

Anti-tax coalitions benefit when government services become visibly dysfunctional—it reinforces narratives that government can't do anything well, which justifies tax cuts that further constrain public services, which accelerates the dysfunction cycle.

Political scientist Jacob Hacker calls this "policy feedback"—how the design of policies shapes political constituencies and future policy trajectories. When social programs are structured to be stigmatizing, inadequate, and fragile, they create weak political coalitions that can't defend them effectively. When programs are universal, generous, and robust (like Social Security), they create powerful constituencies that make them difficult to cut.

The weaponization of services is partly about creating the political conditions for their own elimination—by making programs weak and unpopular enough that their dismantling faces minimal resistance.

The Disciplinary Function

There's also a darker logic: dysfunctional safety net programs serve a disciplinary purpose in labor markets.

When unemployment benefits are inadequate and difficult to access, when healthcare is tied to employment, when food assistance is stigmatizing and insufficient—workers become more desperate and therefore more compliant. You can't risk getting fired when the alternative is immediate crisis. You can't organize for better wages when you're one paycheck from homelessness. You can't leave an abusive workplace when you need employer-sponsored health insurance.

Economists call this the "reserve army of labor" function—maintaining a population in precarity disciplines the entire workforce by making the threat of job loss catastrophic. Weak safety nets amplify this disciplinary power.

Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes about how deliberately constructed precarity is a form of social control—keeping populations anxious and struggling prevents them from making political demands or organizing collective power.

From this perspective, a weak, punitive social safety net isn't a bug—it's a feature. It maintains economic hierarchy by ensuring the bottom rungs remain desperate enough to accept any terms of employment.

What Weaponization Looks Like in Practice: Case Studies

Let's get concrete about how this plays out in specific domains.

Case Study 1: Child Welfare and the Family Separation Industrial Complex

Child welfare systems in the U.S. are a particularly stark example of weaponized services. They nominally exist to protect children, but the way they're structured often does the opposite—particularly for poor families and families of color.

The pattern:

• Underfund supportive services that could help struggling families (mental health, substance use treatment, housing assistance, childcare)
• Over-surveil poor families through mandated reporting, home visits, compliance checks that middle-class families never face
• Set impossible compliance standards (maintain employment while attending multiple weekly appointments, secure stable housing on welfare-level income, complete parenting classes that meet once weekly during work hours)
• Punish failure to comply with the ultimate weapon: child removal
• Provide inadequate reunification support making family separation functionally permanent for many

Professor Dorothy Roberts documents how the child welfare system functions as a family separation regime, disproportionately targeting Black families—not because of higher rates of abuse, but because of higher rates of surveillance, poverty (which gets interpreted as neglect), and system intervention.

The cruelty is that the system purports to protect children while systematically undermining families' capacity to care for children—then uses the instability it creates as justification for permanent separation.

And who benefits? Private foster care agencies, residential treatment centers, and adoption facilitation organizations that generate revenue from child placement. In many states, child welfare has been partially privatized, creating profit incentives for family separation.

Meanwhile, caseworkers—who entered the field wanting to help families—become agents of family destruction, forced to enforce policies they often recognize as harmful. The moral injury is profound, and turnover is catastrophic, which further destabilizes the system, which leads to worse outcomes, which justifies further intervention, which intensifies the harm cycle.

Case Study 2: Veterans Services and the Wait Time Weapon

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been subjected to decades of systematic weaponization that offers a clear blueprint of the process.

Starting in the 1980s and accelerating after 2001:

1. Wars create massive increases in veteran population needing services (particularly mental health and disability support)
2. VA funding fails to keep pace with need, creating backlogs and wait times
3. Wait times become scandals (particularly the 2014 Phoenix VA wait time scandal where veterans died while waiting for appointments)
4. Scandals justify "reform" in the form of privatization—veterans get vouchers to see private providers rather than expanding VA capacity
5. Private care fragments treatment and often provides lower quality (private mental health providers lack expertise in military-specific trauma, coordination of care breaks down)
6. VA loses funding to private contracts while still being blamed for all gaps in veteran care
7. Calls for further privatization accelerate

Researcher Suzanne Gordon documents how this process has systematically shifted billions in VA funding from direct care to private contracts—enriching healthcare corporations while weakening the integrated VA system that research shows provides better outcomes for veterans.

The weaponization here specifically exploits veterans' sacrifice—using their real struggles (created by inadequate funding) to justify further cuts to the very system designed to serve them. And the care workers—VA nurses, social workers, psychiatrists—are caught watching the capacity to serve erode while being blamed for wait times they have no power to solve.

Case Study 3: SNAP and the Manufactured Cliff

SNAP benefit calculations exemplify how services can be structured to harm even as they help.

Benefits are calculated to provide roughly $1.50 per person per meal—just enough to avoid literal starvation, but not enough for adequate nutrition. The average benefit is $234 per month per person.

But here's where weaponization becomes explicit: SNAP has strict income eligibility cutoffs and benefit phase-outs that create massive "cliffs."

Example: A single parent with two children earning $2,000/month might receive $500 in SNAP benefits. If their wages increase to $2,500/month (a $500 raise), they might lose $400 in SNAP benefits—a net gain of only $100. Effectively, they worked for additional hours and kept 20% of what they earned, because benefits disappeared.

This is sometimes called the "benefits cliff" or "poverty trap"—the structure creates powerful disincentives to earn more, advance in careers, or take higher-paying jobs because the benefit loss outweighs the wage gain.

This serves multiple functions:

• It keeps people in low-wage work (unable to afford to take risks on better opportunities)
• It creates visible "dependency" (people appear to be "choosing" not to work more, when actually they're making rational economic decisions within irrational structures)
• It justifies work requirements (if people on SNAP aren't working "enough," impose mandates—ignoring that the benefit structure punishes additional work)
• It fragments political support (working poor people think SNAP recipients "have it easier," instead of recognizing that both groups are being exploited by wage suppression and inadequate benefits)

Meanwhile, caseworkers administering SNAP face impossible situations—explaining to clients that earning $20 more per week will cost them $80 in benefits, watching people make economically rational decisions to decline raises or reduce hours, knowing the whole system is designed to fail them.

Economist Michael Wiseman has documented extensively how benefit cliffs and phase-outs in U.S. anti-poverty programs create effective marginal tax rates on the poor exceeding 80%—meaning poor families keep less than 20 cents of every additional dollar they earn. This isn't a design flaw. It's policy.

The Resistance Framework: Naming Weaponization to Fight Back

Understanding weaponization changes how we organize resistance. If the system is designed to break us, then resistance requires more than individual resilience—it requires collective action targeting the design itself.

Strategy 1: Document the Violence

One of the most powerful forms of resistance is creating undeniable records of harm that can't be dismissed as anecdotal or exceptional.

This means:

• Systematic tracking of how policy changes affect caseloads, wait times, client outcomes
• Worker testimonials documenting the impossible decisions they're forced to make
• Client stories showing the human cost of administrative barriers and benefit cliffs
• Aggregate data demonstrating patterns across organizations and sectors

Organizations like the National Council of Nonprofits are beginning to track sector-wide employment losses and funding cuts, but we need more granular documentation linking specific policy decisions to specific harms.

Every time a client is turned away, document it. Every time a program closes, name why. Every time a worker leaves due to burnout, record what pushed them out. This creates an evidence base that can't be dismissed as isolated problems or individual failings.

The goal is to make visible the invisible violence—to create records that force acknowledgment of the harm being deliberately caused.

Strategy 2: Refuse the Individualization

Weaponization depends on isolation—convincing each care worker their struggle is personal, each organization's crisis is unique, each sector's challenges are specific.

Resistance means collective framing: this is not a social work crisis or an education crisis or a healthcare crisis—this is an organized assault on care itself.

This requires:

• Cross-sector organizing: building alliances between teachers, social workers, healthcare workers, nonprofit staff
• Shared language: naming the common patterns (administrative burden, hollow state, moral injury, structural burnout)
• Unified demands: not just "more funding for education" and "more funding for healthcare" but "adequate funding for all care systems"
• Joint action: coordinated testimonies at budget hearings, cross-sector letter-writing campaigns, allied protest

When care workers across sectors recognize they're facing the same weaponization framework, they can build political power that transcends individual issue silos.

Strategy 3: Attack the Narrative at Its Foundation

The weaponization framework depends on specific narratives: that individuals are responsible for structural outcomes, that scarcity is inevitable rather than constructed, that program failures result from poor design rather than deliberate defunding.

Resistance requires narrative warfare—systematically dismantling these stories and replacing them with accurate ones:

Replace: "Social programs are inefficient"
With: "Social programs are deliberately underfunded to create inefficiency that justifies further cuts"

Replace: "Care workers aren't resilient enough"
With: "Care workers are experiencing moral injury from being forced to operate impossible systems"

Replace: "We can't afford to fully fund the safety net"
With: "We choose not to fund the safety net adequately while spending trillions on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate subsidies"

Replace: "People on benefits need to work harder"
With: "Benefit structures punish work through cliffs and phase-outs that trap people in poverty"

This isn't just rhetorical—narrative frames shape policy debates. When the dominant frame is "program failure," the solution is cuts and privatization. When the dominant frame is "systematic defunding," the solution is restoration and expansion.

Organizations like the Frameworks Institute study how to shift public narratives on social issues. Their research shows that explanatory metaphors, careful value framing, and consistent messaging can move public opinion significantly—but it requires coordination and persistence.

Strategy 4: Build Parallel Structures

While fighting to fix existing systems, we also need to build alternative structures that meet immediate needs and model what adequate care could look like.

This includes:

• Mutual aid networks that provide direct support without administrative burden
• Worker cooperatives in care sectors that prioritize sustainability and shared governance
• Community-controlled alternatives to privatized services
• Solidarity economies that redistribute resources outside market logic

The purpose isn't to let government off the hook—we still demand full public funding for care. But parallel structures serve several functions:

They keep people alive while we fight for systemic change
They model alternatives that demonstrate adequate care is possible when structures are designed for thriving rather than extraction
They build power through networks of reciprocity and shared governance
They create exit options that reduce desperation and increase capacity to refuse exploitative conditions

Dean Spade writes about how mutual aid should be explicitly political—not charity that substitutes for government, but solidarity practices that build collective power while meeting immediate needs.

Strategy 5: Target the Profiteers

One of the most effective points of leverage is exposing and attacking the entities profiting from care system collapse.

This means:

• Naming private equity firms acquiring nonprofit organizations and extracting value while cutting services
• Tracking government contractors who underpay workers while executives extract bonuses
• Exposing charter school operators who funnel public money into real estate deals
• Documenting prison corporation profits from mass incarceration

When we can show that specific entities are getting rich by harvesting the wreckage of public services, it creates political pressure and targets for organized campaigns.

The In the Public Interest organization tracks privatization and corporate influence in public services, providing models for how to research and expose profiteering. Their reports on private prison contracts, privatized water systems, and charter school land deals offer blueprints for investigative work in care sectors.

Campaigns targeting specific bad actors—demanding contract cancellations, divestment from private prison operators, or closure of fraudulent charter networks—can win concrete victories while building movement infrastructure.

Self-Preservation While Fighting: Sustainable Resistance

Here's the hardest part: resisting weaponization requires energy and capacity that weaponization systematically destroys. How do you organize when you're too exhausted to think? How do you fight back when survival is consuming all your bandwidth?

There are no perfect answers, but there are approaches that help.

Rotation and Rest as Strategy

Movement organizing often assumes sustained high-intensity engagement—but that model burns people out rapidly and recreates the exploitation we're fighting against.

An alternative model: rotation.

This means:

• Explicitly time-limited commitments: "I'll co-lead this campaign for six months, then I'm rotating out"
• Clear role handoffs: documenting work so others can pick it up without reinventing
• Protected rest periods: when you rotate out, you genuinely step back—no "emergency" calls, no guilt about not staying engaged
• Shallow work during intensive periods: if you're doing intensive organizing, reduce everything else to bare minimum

The goal is creating sustainable engagement rhythms—people cycling through periods of high engagement and recovery rather than burning out completely and leaving forever.

This requires cultural shift in organizing spaces—valuing rotation as strength rather than viewing it as insufficient commitment. It means celebrating people who rotate out as making space for others, not shaming them for "abandoning" the work.

Collective Care Infrastructure

Individual self-care isn't enough. We need collective care structures that sustain people through organizing.

This looks like:

• Mutual aid within organizing spaces: childcare collectives, meal shares, transportation networks
• Mental health support: peer counseling, support groups specifically for care workers doing organizing
• Economic solidarity: emergency funds for organizers who need to reduce paid work hours, rent assistance, healthcare cost-sharing
• Skill-sharing: teaching each other organizing skills so knowledge isn't concentrated in people who then become bottlenecks

The Mutual Aid Disaster Relief network offers models of how to structure collective care within organizing—their "pods" system creates small accountability groups that provide material support and emotional grounding for members doing frontline disaster response work.

Strategic Selectivity

You cannot fight every battle. Trying to do so guarantees burnout and diffusion of impact.

This means:

• Choosing specific campaigns with defined goals and endpoints rather than vague ongoing engagement
• Identifying where your specific skills/resources/position create leverage and focusing there
• Saying no to requests that don't align with strategic priorities, even when the cause is worthy
• Accepting that other struggles will be led by others and your role is support rather than leadership

This is emotionally difficult—it feels like abandoning fights that matter. But the reality is you cannot be effective everywhere. Strategic selectivity means maximizing impact with finite energy rather than diluting yourself into uselessness.

Organizer Mariame Kaba talks about "choosing the smallest winnable battle"—identifying fights where victory is genuinely possible in reasonable timeframes with available resources. Wins build capacity for larger fights. Endless unwinnable struggles destroy movements.

Joy as Resistance

This might sound frivolous given the gravity of what we're facing, but joy and pleasure are actually crucial to sustainable resistance.

adrienne maree brown writes about this explicitly: movements that can't create joy will collapse. Oppressive systems want us to be grim, exhausted, constantly in crisis mode—because that state prevents strategic thinking, corrodes relationships, and drives people away.

Joy in organizing looks like:

• Celebration of small wins: marking progress rather than only focusing on how far we have to go
• Cultural practices: music, food, ritual that connect us to traditions of resistance
• Friendship and intimacy: organizing spaces that nurture genuine relationships, not just transactional collaboration
• Fun: activities that are purely enjoyable, not instrumental to goals

This isn't distraction from the work. It's the foundation that makes the work sustainable. Movements powered by grim determination eventually burn out. Movements rooted in joy and connection persist.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If you've read this far, you understand the depth of what we're facing. The weaponization of care is not a temporary crisis—it's a systematic process that's been unfolding for decades and will continue unless we build sufficient power to stop it.

But understanding the mechanism gives us clarity about what resistance must look like. We're not fighting individual bad policies—we're fighting an organized framework designed to break us.

That means our response must be equally organized, equally strategic, and explicitly long-term.

Immediate Actions

This week:

• Document one instance of impossible conditions or harmful policy in your workplace
• Connect with one person in a different care sector and compare experiences
• Identify one pressure point (a decision-maker, a contract up for renewal, a budget hearing) where organized voices could make a difference

This month:

• Join or start a cross-sector care worker group in your community
• Attend one budget hearing or city council meeting to testify about care system needs
• Support one campaign targeting privatization or profiteering in care services

This year:

• Build sustained relationships with care workers in other sectors/organizations
• Develop documentation systems that track policy harms over time
• Participate in at least one direct action (protest, letter campaign, coordinated testimony) targeting the weaponization framework

Long-Term Vision

But immediate actions aren't enough. We need a long-term vision of what we're building toward—not just stopping cuts, but fundamentally restructuring how care is valued, funded, and organized in society.

This means:

Economic restructuring: Care work must be compensated at levels that reflect its actual value and complexity. This requires federal and state wage standards, full funding of overhead and benefits, and an end to the expectation that "mission" substitutes for fair pay.

Democratic governance: Care systems should be governed by the people who provide and receive care, not by distant bureaucrats or corporate boards. This means worker cooperatives, community-controlled nonprofits, and meaningful participation structures in public agencies.

Universal provision: Care should be decommodified—housing, healthcare, food security, education provided as rights rather than means-tested benefits with stigma and barriers. Universal programs create strong constituencies that resist cuts.

Abolition of harmful systems: Some systems (like child welfare as currently structured, or the prison-industrial complex) can't be reformed—they need to be abolished and replaced with actual support. This requires long-term organizing toward transformative change, not just incremental improvement.

Solidarity economies: Building alternative economic structures based on reciprocity and mutual aid rather than market logic. This includes time banks, cooperative care networks, community land trusts, and other models that prefigure the world we're building toward.

These aren't utopian fantasies. They're practical necessities if we want care systems that actually work—and if we want care workers to survive.

The Stakes: What Happens If We Don't Fight Back

Let's be brutally honest about what's coming if we don't successfully resist weaponization.

Scenario 1: Complete Privatization

In this trajectory, public and nonprofit care systems continue collapsing until private corporations control most service delivery. We can see previews in:

• Private prison systems where profit motives lead to horrific conditions and lobbying for mass incarceration
• For-profit colleges that extracted billions in student debt while providing minimal education
• Charter school networks that segregate students, exclude high-need populations, and extract public resources

A fully privatized care sector would mean:

• Services available only to those who can pay market rates
• Workers paid poverty wages with no job security while executives extract massive compensation
• Constant pressure to cut costs, reduce quality, speed up service delivery
• No democratic accountability or public oversight
• Surveillance and data extraction as additional profit centers

This isn't speculation—it's the logical endpoint of current trajectories.

Scenario 2: Total Systems Collapse

Alternatively, systems could collapse entirely without functional replacements emerging. We see hints of this in:

• Rural areas losing hospitals entirely as facilities close without alternatives
• Child welfare systems in some counties that have essentially stopped functioning due to staffing crises
• Mental health deserts where no providers exist for hundreds of miles

Complete collapse would mean:

• Communities with no formal care infrastructure at all
• Return to family and church-based care that excludes anyone outside those networks
• Massive preventable suffering and death
• Breakdown of social cohesion as people fight over scarce resources
• Strengthening of authoritarian control as "order" becomes the only political priority

This also isn't hyperbole—it's happening in specific locations already.

Scenario 3: Permanent Subordination

Even without full privatization or collapse, we could settle into a permanent state where:

• Care work is understood as low-status, low-wage, exploitable labor
• People cycle through care jobs rapidly, burning out and leaving
• Services exist but are perpetually inadequate and crisis-driven
• Communities accept this as "how things are" rather than organizing for change

This might be the most dangerous scenario because it's sustainable (unlike collapse) and doesn't trigger the outrage that overt privatization might. It's just normalized misery, accepted as inevitable.

The alternative to all of these is organized resistance—building power sufficient to force a different path.

A Note on Hope

I want to end with something important: understanding weaponization is heavy. Seeing the full scope of what's been done deliberately to break care systems and the people who sustain them is enraging and grief-inducing.

That's appropriate. Rage and grief are reasonable responses to injustice.

But I also want you to know: we are not powerless.

The fact that this framework requires such elaborate construction—the staged defunding, the narrative manipulation, the worker exploitation—reveals its fragility. If care systems naturally failed or people naturally didn't want to do care work, none of this apparatus would be necessary.

The weaponization exists because care is powerful. Because people are deeply committed to it. Because communities will fight to protect it when they understand what's at stake.

Every point where the framework operates is also a point of potential resistance:

• When they try to individualize burnout, we collectivize it
• When they fragment sectors, we build cross-sector solidarity
• When they privatize, we expose the profiteers and demand public alternatives
• When they create dependency and shame, we build mutual aid and dignity
• When they manufacture failure, we document the systematic defunding that caused it

The fight is hard. The opposition is powerful and well-resourced. The timeline is long.

But care workers have something the architects of weaponization don't: we actually understand how care works. We know what communities need. We have relationships and trust that can't be purchased or manufactured.

And we have each other.

Resources for Deeper Understanding

Books and Research

On weaponization and austerity:

• The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (disaster capitalism and manufactured crises)
• Strangling the Bureaucracy by Jennifer Payne and Pamela Herd (administrative burden in social programs)
• Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (how systems are designed to ignore women's care work)
• The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee (how racism hurts everyone by undermining public goods)

On care work specifically:

• For Crying Out Loud: Women's Poverty in the United States edited by Diane Dujon and Ann Withorn
• Caring Democracy by Joan Tronto (political theory of care)
• The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective (alternative visions for care systems)

On organizing and resistance:

• Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown (movement building for sustainable change)
• No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power by Jane McAlevey (deep organizing vs shallow mobilizing)
• We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba (abolition organizing and transformative justice)

Organizations Tracking These Issues

Sector-wide data and advocacy:

• National Council of Nonprofits (nonprofit sector trends and policy analysis)
• Urban Institute (research on nonprofit funding and sustainability)
• Chronicle of Philanthropy (tracking layoffs and sector changes)

Privatization resistance:

• In the Public Interest (exposing privatization schemes and corporate profiteering)
• American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (public sector worker organizing)

Alternative economic models:

• Solidarity Economy Network (building cooperative alternatives)
• US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (worker ownership in care sectors)
• National Domestic Workers Alliance (organizing care workers for power)

Research on administrative burden and policy design:

• Frameworks Institute (narrative strategy for social issues)
• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (analysis of safety net programs)

Connect With Others

This fight can't be fought alone. Here are ways to find your people:

Local organizing:

• Search for "[your city] nonprofit alliance" or "[your state] human services coalition"
• Attend city council and county budget hearings—you'll meet other care workers showing up
• Join or start a peer support group for care workers in your sector

Online communities:

• Follow hashtags like #NonprofitLife #SocialWorkTwitter #CareWork
• Join Facebook groups for care workers in your specific field
• Participate in virtual organizing spaces like those run by Movement for Black Lives or Showing Up for Racial Justice

Union organizing:

• If your workplace isn't unionized, contact SEIU, AFT, or AFSCME to learn about organizing
• If you're already union, get active in your local and push for sector-wide solidarity

Final Thoughts: Your Exhaustion Tells the Truth

If you're reading this and feeling overwhelmed, that's understandable. The scope of weaponization is massive, and the resistance required is substantial.

But I want you to sit with something: Your exhaustion is evidence.

Every time you feel crushed by impossible caseloads—that's evidence the system is deliberately understaffed.

Every time you have to turn away someone who needs help—that's evidence resources are being withheld strategically.

Every time you watch a colleague burn out and leave—that's evidence the exploitation is unsustainable.

Every time you feel like you're failing—that's evidence you've internalized a structural crisis as personal inadequacy.

Your body knows the truth. Your breaking points reveal the weapon's design.

The question is: what do we do with that knowledge?

We can continue absorbing the violence individually, burning out quietly, disappearing from the work while the system grinds up the next wave of idealistic care workers.

Or we can collectivize our knowledge, organize our power, and fight back against the framework designed to destroy us.

The choice isn't about individual heroism or personal capacity. It's about whether we build structures of collective resistance strong enough to challenge weaponization at scale.

I don't know if we'll win. The forces arrayed against care are powerful, entrenched, and deeply resourced.

But I know we have to try. Because the alternative—accepting the permanent weaponization of care—is unthinkable.

So document the violence. Connect with others. Name what's happening. Organize your workplace. Support campaigns fighting privatization. Build mutual aid networks. Rest when you can. Fight when you're able.

And know that you're not alone in this. Thousands of care workers are waking up to the weaponization framework and deciding to fight back. You're part of something larger than your individual struggle.

Your exhaustion tells the truth about a system that's designed to break you.

Our collective resistance will determine whether it succeeds.

Take Action Today

Don't let this just be another article you read and then close. Here are specific actions you can take in the next 24 hours:

1. Document one thing: Write down one specific instance of impossible working conditions or harmful policy you witnessed this week. Date it. Save it. This is the beginning of your evidence file.

2. Reach out to one person: Text, email, or call one other care worker—in your organization or outside it—and share one thing from this article that resonated. Start the conversation.

3. Find one organization: Research one local or national organization fighting weaponization (from the resources list above) and follow their work. Sign up for their newsletter. Mark their next action in your calendar.

4. Commit to one boundary: Choose one boundary you're going to hold this week—leaving on time, not answering work emails after a certain hour, saying no to one additional responsibility. Practice it.

5. Share this resource: If this article helped you understand what you're experiencing, share it with others. Post it in your work Slack. Email it to colleagues. The more people who understand weaponization, the stronger our resistance becomes.

The system is designed to isolate you, exhaust you, and break you. Every action you take toward connection, documentation, and resistance disrupts that design.

Start today. Start small. But start.

This is a companion piece to Episode 6 of Burnout and Breakthroughs: "The Collapse of Care: Layoffs, Government Shutdowns, & the War on Service." Listen to the full episode at [burnoutandbreakthroughs.com] for personal narratives and additional context.

If this resonated with you, please share it widely. The more care workers who understand weaponization, the stronger our collective resistance becomes.

Questions, responses, or stories to share? Email me at contact@burnoutandbreakthroughs.com. I read every message, and your experiences inform future episodes and resources.

Together, we document. Together, we organize. Together, we resist.