Business interests have always wanted to get their claws into the public coffers, the military industrial complex having been the most successful at it, with billions in weapon system contracts that were nothing more than massive pork barrels - we're into the F-35 for over 2 Trillion dollars with planes that remain too problematic to put into front line readiness, the Zumwalt class destroyers were contracted out for 32 scheduled builds, and US taxpayers ended up with only three at a cost of over 8 billion dollars a piece, and remain so highly problematic they are not considered front line ready, etc, etc.
Social Security has always been the apex target, with effort after effort to privatize the funds so money managers can make billions off of managing those funds 'for us'.
The recent attempt to pass a bill to sell 3 billion acres of public land would have had little return to taxpayers, it was solely designed to provide land for cheap to developers and corporations who would make billions on development projects.
What has changed is the raw openness of these current scams. Openly appointing private industry players with zero operational experience to be put in charge of departments within the US government with the sole intent to reduce and eliminate the services those departments provide and replace them with contracted services provided by the industries the appointees have a financial interest in.
Such scams work best when politics are sufficiently polarized by keeping the social war of 'us vs them' at sufficient fevered pitch that US taxpayer attention is kept on the polarization theatrics instead of the actions of the scammers and grifters who are fleecing us.
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