A Conservative Call for a Department for Humane Living

We are a country of abundance, ingenuity, and compassion, and yet we entrust the moral and logistical challenge of poverty relief to a patchwork of disconnected programs scattered across dozens of federal agencies. SNAP lives at the USDA. Section 8 vouchers are housed in HUD. Medicaid is managed by HHS, but its rules vary wildly by state. Unemployment insurance runs through the Department of Labor. And the IRS handles the Earned Income Tax Credit, perhaps the most backhanded way imaginable to get support to struggling families. There are at least eighty different antipoverty programs at the federal level alone, spread across at least nine departments and six independent agencies.

Is it any wonder we still have a poverty problem after sixty years of our War on Poverty (how many Americans even remember that we declared such a thing?) and $30 trillion —trillion! — spent on antipoverty programs in that time?

It’s been estimated that we could end global hunger for just $50 billion per year. At $30 trillion, we could have done it six hundred times by now.

What we lack is not money or mechanisms. What we lack is focus. We lack moral clarity and administrative coherence. We need a central, cabinet-level agency whose sole task is to ensure that no American is condemned to poverty; not by accident of birth, not by economic displacement, and not by bureaucratic neglect.

The Case for a Department for Humane Living

Much like USAID exists to promote human development abroad, the Department for Humane Living would exist to ensure that Americans have access to the foundational conditions of dignity: shelter, food, healthcare, clean water, and opportunity.

This isn’t just a bureaucratic reshuffling. It’s a moral re-centering, a declaration that in the richest nation in human history, no citizen should fall through the cracks because federal help is scattered across fifteen agencies that don’t talk to each other.

As a conservative, I know I’m supposed to favor federalism and local control over centralization, and generally, I do. But when the federal government has already taken it upon itself to address a problem, and has done so in the most disorganized, scatterbrained, and wasteful way imaginable — maximizing cost and inefficiency, lacking any consistent methodology, and spreading responsibility so thinly across countless programs and personnel that accountability becomes impossible — then centralization isn’t tyranny. It’s efficiency through mission-focused accountability.

Conservative Principles in Action

A cabinet-level Department for Humane Living would do more than redistribute resources. It would unify, streamline, and morally anchor the dozens of fragmented antipoverty programs we already fund. It would set a budget, and have to live within it. It would set goals, and have to meet them. It would consolidate functions currently spread across HUD, HHS, the Department of Labor, USDA, and the IRS, while applying a consistent standard: support for the truly needy, accountability for the able, and opportunity for everyone.

Rather than enabling dependency, the Department for Humane Living would be guided by conservative principles: individual dignity, personal responsibility, and social cohesion. It would be rigorous in oversight, transparent in metrics, and committed to ending the perverse incentives that currently reward failure, punish success, disincentivize marriage, and make no distinction between those who can’t help themselves and those who simply won’t. The result today is not dignity, but dependency. Not justice, but injustice, to both taxpayer and recipient.

This Isn’t Liberalism. It’s Leadership.

Some will say this sounds like a liberal idea. Nothing could be further from the truth. The modern welfare state — designed by Democrats because Republicans have largely sat it out, preferring instead to campaign against it rather than fix it — has become a sprawling, unaccountable, inefficient behemoth. It operates without unity of purpose, measures success by dollars spent rather than lives changed, and increasingly enshrines victimhood as a permanent identity.

Conservatives should not cede the moral high ground. We are the ones who believe government should be limited but competent, that work should be rewarded, that families should be strengthened, and that faith and compassion are better guides than cold bureaucracy. Republicans led the effort to reform welfare in the 1990s. We should lead again, this time, by designing a humane system from the ground up.

It is also time for us to reclaim the language of moral duty. Americans want to help the poor. It is the Christian thing to do, far preferable to the secular cruelty of “survival of the fittest.” But they want to do it smartly, with discernment and moral wisdom. They want to help those who are down, not those who are gaming the system. They want to elevate the poor, not enable aimlessness.

Let Conservatives Lead

A Department for Humane Living would reflect these values. It would make compassion efficient, and morality effective.

Let us be clear: this is not about growing government. It’s about refocusing it. The welfare bureaucracy we already have is bloated, confusing, and too often counterproductive. Every department sees poverty relief as little more than a budget line they’re happy to keep growing. What we need is ownership. We need one agency accountable for the humane conditions of American life, and one Secretary who reports directly to the President on whether families are eating, working, living safely, and moving forward.

We have USAID to provide humane development abroad. Isn’t it time we had the same commitment at home?

This is a moment for vision, which, admittedly, conservatives too often lack. And when we do have it, it’s often aimed backward. For once, forward vision should come from the right. Conservatives can and must build a welfare system that honors work, protects the vulnerable, distinguishes the unwilling from the unable, and lifts Americans into dignity, not dependency.

Let the Democrats defend the labyrinth. Let Republicans lead the reform. Let us be the party not just of tax cuts and budgets, but of humane living. Because a strong nation begins with strong people. And strong people begin with a moral commitment: that in this country, no one gets left behind.

Conservatives should champion it. Christians should demand it. And America will rise through it.