On Feb. 8, George W. Bush threw down a gauntlet on the domestic priorities front by signing into law the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. The DRA, passed by the US House of Representatives on Feb. 1 by a razor-thin party-line 216-214 vote, aims allegedly to reduce federal spending by $39 billion, mainly by enacting monumental budget cuts over the next five years to major federal social programs--including $36 billion from Medicare, $4.7 billion from Medicaid, and $12.7 billion from student loan programs.

The Medicare and Medicaid cuts are heartless enough--to say nothing of the irony of their enactment by an erstwhile "compassionate conservative." But the student aid cuts stand out as worthy of separate discussion, considering the severe repercussions they could have for the face of campus politics--and the role played by students in catalyzing progressive social change--in America in the coming decade.

First the basic facts: The DRA will negatively affect the affordability of public higher education nationwide by, among other means, cutting the amount of student loan money guaranteed by the federal government--thereby causing interest rates to rise. Under the DRA, on July 1 the rate for new Stafford Loans for students will jump from 4.7 percent to 6.8 percent, and the rate for new PLUS loans for parents will jump from 6.1 percent to 8.5 percent. In addition, buried in the DRA is a section that will make it illegal for students to consolidate their loans while they're still in school, eliminating an option that currently enables students to lock in currently low rates.

The same week Bush signed the DRA, he also unveiled a $2.77 trillion proposed budget for the 2007 fiscal year that includes a 6.9 percent increase in defense spending--while preserving the tax cuts he won during his first term in office. Under this budget, "official" defense spending will increase to $439.3 billion--but this figure does not include the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For these, Bush is requesting another $120 billion in "emergency" funding. De facto, more than half a trillion dollars is being allocated for military funding in Bush's FY 2007 budget.

Meanwhile, Bush is also proposing cuts in hundreds of other domestic programs, including environmental protection programs; assistance for low-income families, children, and elderly and disabled people; and research related to cancer, heart disease, and other deadly medical conditions.

It's clear in the wake of the DRA where the true priorities of the Bush Bunch remain. As Rev. Joseph Lowery put it so civically, if not civilly, during Coretta Scott King's funeral on Feb. 7: "For war billions more but no more for the poor." Such priorities will of course keep the likes of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas happily feeding at the public trough "until the job is done" in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there's likely an additional benefit for Imperial America in Bush's budgetary snubbing of higher education: namely, a drastic diminishing of liberal and progressive activism on America's college campuses.

It's widely acknowledged among social historians that students have been in the vanguard of many powerful and effective social movements, most notably the 1960s antiwar and civil rights movements and the 1990s anti-sweatshop and anti-corporate globalization movements. Much of that energy has come from students from underprivileged communities, be they peoples of color or the white working class. But unfortunately, as higher education has become increasingly less accessible to these communities in recent years due to the effects of free-market ideology on public institutions, progressive activism on American campuses has noticeably declined as a corollary. For many progressive-minded but financially-struggling students, college life is increasingly becoming a stark choice between engaging in social causes as part of a well-rounded education and keeping one's head above the turbulent waters of a stressful academic workload.

Meanwhile, though young conservatives may publicly and dramatically weep and gnash their teeth over alleged liberal dominance of the academy, in reality conservatism has lately become the dominant political force on many American campuses--reinforced with notable support from well-funded conservative groups, who provide campus groups such as the College Republicans with more than $35 million for publicity and publications each year. Never mind the ivory tower; the academy is becoming a microcosm of the class war that conservatives have been fomenting in America for the past quarter century.

On the local front, at the University of Washington, attempts in recent years by the UW student government and grassroots campus groups such as WashPIRG to organize students to fight financial aid cuts and tuition increases, both on campus and in Olympia, have drawn dismal turnouts. Such apparent apathy could be due either to pessimism or the protective cocoon of class privilege--or perhaps nihilism of the sort that Cornel West convincingly laments in his 2004 manifesto Democracy Matters. Perhaps many students, to quote West, "have simply lost faith that their participation could really matter." It's certainly no longer the heyday of Students for a Democratic Society, whose presence at the UW back in the Vietnam day catalyzed several massive student actions against the military-academic-industrial complex in all its manifestations. Tuition was still cheap back then. These days, sadly, it's increasingly a free-market luxury.

I've quoted Cornel West above, now I'll paraphrase him:

Student power matters are frightening in our time.

Given the one-two punch of long-running trends toward free-market tuition and privatization with one fist, and now, with the other, the DRA's drastic education cuts--agreed by many to be, in sum, the single largest cut to higher education funding in the US Department of Education's history--the Bush Bunch, and the power structure they represent, appear to be aiming for the complete dismantlement of public higher education, that ever-pesky perpetuator of the empowerment of the rabble. Of all the social justice struggles that progressive students have participated in over the decades, it's now clear that their own ability to effectively participate in such struggles--much less to overcome disempowerment on a personal level, by way of education--has become a cause in itself. All that cause needs is a catalyst.

Students, George W. Bush has thrown a gauntlet at your feet. What are you going to do about it?