The Trump Budget
I interrupt my travels around Appalachia this week that have taken me away from both the blog and the 21st century for a brief post on the Trump budget. It’s as great a monstrosity as you would expect.
Trump’s first budget proposal, which he named “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” would increase defense spending by $54 billion and then offset that by stripping money from more than 18 other agencies. Some would be hit particularly hard, with reductions of more than 20 percent at the Agriculture, Labor and State departments and of more than 30 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency.
It would also propose eliminating future federal support for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Within EPA alone, 50 programs and 3,200 positions would be eliminated.
The cuts could represent the widest swath of reductions in federal programs since the drawdown after World War II, probably leading to a sizable cutback in the federal non-military workforce, something White House officials said was one of their goals.
Parts of the budget proposal also appear to contradict Trump’s agenda. Trump has said he wants to eliminate all disease, but the budget chops funding for the National Institutes of Health by $5.8 billion, or close to 20 percent. He has said he wants to create a $1 trillion infrastructure program, but the proposal would eliminate a Transportation Department program that funds nearly $500 million in road projects. It does not include new funding amounts or a tax mechanism for Trump’s infrastructure program, postponing those decisions.
And the Trump administration proposed to eliminate a number of other programs, particularly those that serve low-income Americans and minorities, because it questioned their effectiveness. This included the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which disburses more than $3 billion annually to help heat homes in the winter. It also proposed abolishing the Community Development Block Grant program, which provides roughly $3 billion for targeted projects related to affordable housing, community development and homelessness programs, among other things.
The budget was stuffed with other cuts and reductions. It calls for privatizing the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control function, cutting all funding for long-distance Amtrak train services and eliminating EPA funding for the restoration of Chesapeake Bay. Job training programs would also be cut, pushing more responsibility for this onto the states and employers.
Many Republicans have criticized these programs in the past as wasteful and ineffective, but supporters have said the programs are vital for communities in need.
The proposed budget extensively targets Obama programs and investments focused on climate change, seeking to eliminate payments to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund — one key component of the U.S. commitment to the Paris climate agreement — and to slash research funding for climate, ocean and earth science programs at agencies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. At the same time, clean-energy research, heavily privileged by the Obama administration, would suffer greatly under the budget with the elimination of the ARPA-E program (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) at the Energy Department and an unspecified cut to the agency’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
But here’s the thing: While some parts of this are uniquely Trump and will be definitely pushed back by fellow Republicans, such as the State Department cuts, the vast majority of this isn’t a Trump budget so much as a Republican budget. What Republicans will stand up for the NEA and NEH? Which Republicans will reinstate the Sea Grant for universities like URI? Which Republicans will fight for climate change research funding? Which Republicans will fight for the National Park Service? It’s possible that McConnell will step up for the Appalachian Regional Commission since it brings money to his state, but then again, Kentucky Republicans are so destroying their own state internally that maybe he won’t care.
We have to remember that the enemy is not Donald Trump. It’s the Republican Party.
One of the things that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough is that making these cuts will not only hurt the people who benefit from these agencies and programs, but the people who work for them. Trump is getting rid of thousands of jobs, and nobody who voted for him because he was going to help working Americans seems bothered by this.
Yeah—well those fucking assholes hold government workers in the same esteem as black people.
I can’t believe people still fall for this shit.
Well, seeing as in the middle and late 20th century, government jobs were a stepping stone to the middle class for a lot of black people, that might be redundant.
(I read Hidden Figures a few weeks ago, and one of the things that came through very powerfully was the role NASA – and NACA before it – played in elevating the financial prospects of an entire generation of African-Americans.)
I would be utterly unsurprised to learn that government jobs were considered prestigious – or at least not denigrated – right up until that happened. Then all of a sudden people start snarking about things being “good enough for government work” and all that.
…
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/close_enough_for_government_work
Hmm…
It’s a fairly well known phenomenon that jobs become less prestigious as soon as The Wrong People become associated with them – see also the teaching profession becoming denigrated as glorified baby-sitting precisely as it becomes known as women’s work.
Yes. Anyone who has entered into a gov’t contract knows that requirements are extensive. “Good enough for government work” is a phrase that has been turned on its head.
Appropriate since no one who uses the phrase knows anything about how the government work or quality standards.
I’ve always assumed (and I’ve seen others make the same assumption) that “government small enough to drown in a bathtub” was, at least in part, a reaction to the fact that government jobs served a leveling function for African-Americans.
I think it is much broader than that. It is about the government promoting and protecting the interests of the little people (minorities, women, workers, etc.) and restricting the ability of the sociopathic elites and their sycophants to rape, pillage, and kill.
Related: “Military standard” or “mil spec” or whatever still has positive connotations, at least judging by US marketing material. In Spain, meanwhile, it has long meant “of the lowest possible quality”.
Those aren’t “real” jobs, so they don’t count.
What about the people who work for the people with the fake jobs? Do they count? So if you run a diner near an EPA building and make most of your money serving lunch to EPA workers, is that a real business?
I never understand how far out these “fake job” modifiers extend.
Yeah. Moody’s looked at the budget and said if enacted it could lead to an increase in unemployment of about 1.8% in the DC area. Basically, it could trigger a recession.
Or as every Republican will call it “the Obama recession.”
This is going to be a disaster.
I (and many thousands more) will be out of a job by the fall as a result of this and I don’t even work for the EPA directly. It’s very depressing to watch this dumpster fire continue to burn.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again, the attitude of the White Working Class who lost their manly manufacturing jobs is a dark form of revenge.
They aren’t demanding “Make our lives better” They are demanding “Make other people’s lives suck as much as ours.”
Ah, but you see, those aren't real patriotic manly man jobs, like digging flammable rocks out if the ground, so they don't countYeah, this is something I’ve been thinking about. I wonder if it’s the case that government agencies are so much more likely than private businesses to actually not discriminate in hiring, as the law requires, that in some parts of the country a really disproportionate amount of white people’s interactions with minorities are with people who work for the government. Add to that the fact that interactions with the government are typically fraught with authority issues–TSA, DMV, CPS, etc. all make you feel powerless–and voila, white victimhood is perpetuated. I don’t know that this is a significant effect, but it seems possible; I’d be curious to know more about it. Seems like the economic impact of a large cut in federal jobs could fall disproportionately on minorities and immigrants; I wonder what level of awareness Republicans have of this, either at the leadership level or at the voter level. A sense of government workers as “other” seems to be involved, but is it in terms of culture (govt as imposition of coastal elite values) or race/ethnicity more directly?
+1 on this being a Republican budget.
Defense contractors and billionaires get a massive payday, everyone else gets fucking shafted.
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum
(my rough Google translation of “as it was, is, and ever shall be”)
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Le French est fancy, mais le Latin est PLUS fancy.
The more things stay the same, the more things stay the same.
If you want things to stay the same, things are going to have to change.
Why do people fall for the idea that we need a military that can destroy the world 100 times over and not just 80 times over? Is it because they’re a) stupid, b) like violence and ‘sploding stuff, or c) the military is becoming one of the last remaining institutions that is kind of easy to get into, but puts you in somewhat good stead when you get out of it (barring death, ptsd or other hazards of military service)?
The military is one of the few remaining American institutions that the public says they trust. Criticizing the military is almost verboten. That’s part of it.
It’s all of those in varying degree and add in fear about scary terrorists on the TV. Like Scott’s post from yesterday, the mainstream media have done a lot to misinform people about the dangers of terrorism. Pop culture also serves to make terrorists bigger than they are, because government agents fight terrorism is an easy story to write and an easy story to consume. And the rightwing media is a basically a fear creation machine, so the ones who pay attention to that are even more misinformed.
Put that together with the esteem most Americans say they hold the military in (don’t count on it if you want veteran’s benefits, but it’s in their hearts!) and you get people who’ll say “MORE!” when someone tells them the miltary needs something. The military’s relative uselessness in dealing with terrorism is not a story anyone is particularly interested in telling, so I can see why people connect those dots.
This
I suspect it’s because the only mechanisms we allow for government support permanent long term businesses is medicine, education and the military. Any town with a hospital, a college or a defense contractor has a stable income stream to supplement any other work and can better whether economic downturns.
Now, the Republican party doesn’t believe the government has any role in the first two, so defense contractors are the only Keynesian game in town.
I’ve often only half jokingly thought that we could get support for all kinds of social programs as long as beneficiaries had to go to a military base near them (there usually is one) to receive them and we just call it military spending.
The first big infusion of federal money into K-12 education was to encourage science, math and foreign language study post-Sputnik.
For all the right wing inveighs against an “industrial policy”, the US had a de facto one after World War II, but it was under the rubric of defense spending.
and if it had not been for the broad implementation of that encouragement, from the Cleveland public schools through the Ivy League, my life would have been much impoverished (and several not-half-bad mathematical ideons, hurtling their way through the cosmos, would have had to implant themselves in other beings’ brains). Thanks, Khrushchev! with a hat tip to Лайка, who embodied the ad astra per aspera spirit for generations of stray dogs from the streets of Moscow.
When I was in the military in the late 90s, we had so much money to spend on morale welfare recreation stuff, but we were still using (cargo, but still) parachutes from the Korean War.
Think about all the equipment left behind in the middle east and Afghanistan. There’s billions of dollars worth of equipment just left to ISIS or to rot.
Lots of Americans seem to like that we have a super-huge military compared to most (if not all) other nations. I think even most Democratic Party members would not cut the military budget as much as the average LGMer but I could be wrong.
A few years ago I remember stumbling across an economics paper that theorized that the rest of the world can have nice things (like a welfare state and good public transit) because America effectively acts as a kind of peacekeeper simply by having a huge military.
The job of other NATO members is seemingly to keep things at Bay as the United States gets mobilized to take over.
A few years ago I remember stumbling across an economics paper that theorized that the rest of the world can have nice things (like a welfare state and good public transit) because America effectively acts as a kind of peacekeeper simply by having a huge military.
Germany, France and the UK, to name but three, managed to build all that in the postwar decades while spending much more as a share of GDP on defence than the US does now.
Also for a lot of people, the military seems to be the best option when they turn 18. I went to a super-liberal college where as far as I can tell, almost no one did ROTC. At the undergrad connected to my law school, there are lots of people who do ROTC because it is the only way they can afford college.
Not trusting the military seems to be a minority position in the United States. I remember reading an article in the Times about a kid who died during his Marine training because he never learned to swim as a child. The guy seemed bright but he grew up in an area where his only option upon graduating high school was to get a job at a fast food restaurant next to dad. The military was an out to him that could theoretically lead to better options.
The military is also one of the few institutions left where you can be born poor and successfully get promoted to positions of real power. With the exception of the occasional winner of the tech app lotto, most people outside the military are lucky if they can stay in the economic class they were born into.
You can take all the money and deliver nothing because {redacted for reasons of national security}.
Because we have a whole lot of people who are scared of their own shadows and need really big guns to make them feel good about themselves.
Trump has said he wants to eliminate all disease…
As with so many other things in this Cavalcade of Craptacularity, talk like that used to be satire.
Trump has said he wants to eliminate all disease
Evidently, by killing all the hosts.
“disease” is just what Steve Bannon calls Mexicans.
You know who else said they would “eliminate all disease”? These guys.
Hadn’t seen that sketch in years. Thanks, I needed the laugh.
Trump has said he wants to “eliminate all disease”?
A nuclear holocaust of sufficient size could get the job done.
Cockroaches have diseases, right? So let’s not get too cocky.
But remember, Trump’s a populist.
If this is his first budget, I shudder to think how bad next year’s is going to be. Even more long term, this or something like it is going to be the new baseline for whenever the Democrats are in power again. Just getting back to something sane is going to be a huge political lift, getting something actually good will be even harder.
At the very least, the heighten-the-contradictions argument is about to get a serious field test.
People have already sort of adjusted to the sequester. How many Americans even remember what that was?
This would apparently devastate meals on wheels.
Give the Republicans credit, they are very dedicated and sincere granny starvers. They are going to starve EVERY granny who doesn’t have a trust fund or a 20 acre estate.
Granny starving is now officially Republican policy!
An artifact of my country upbringing is that while I know it’s not what you meant, I know the Republicans can find a granny or two to starve who owns 20 acres or more, but it’s in the wrong place so it’s not even worth enough for to sell it and not need meals on wheels.
The GOP is drowning US and state government in a swamp of Polonium.
Trump is merely grifting, bigly.
The cuts to Meals on Wheels are basically cartoon villainy. The Democrats should be running commercials about this in swing districts across the county.
They should compare it to the cost of security at Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.
While I appreciate the sentiment, in all seriousness, I’m not sure. I think a lot of these idiots want a world where granny gets her meal AND Trump gets to fly down to Mar A Lago every weekend because he’s successful and we shouldn’t stifle success. We’re that far down the rabbit hole with this shit.
A lot of Trump supporters probably think seniors (except for them) deserve to starve.
Old people have bootstraps and IPhones they can forgo updating too!
But Republicans claim to love to convert overreach-blahblah DC mandates to Block Grants? Now Republican Congress and Trump (Bannon? Priebus?) are deleting the block grants.
Republicans didn’t think this through. Some redstate Republicans will have to find other sources for slush funds.
The “Community” in “Community Development” is, since the mid ’60’s, code for “colored people”.
I doubt the relevant parties even knew it had any connection to services like MoW till this morning.
Should have called them Real America Block Grants.
That extra $54B for the ‘military’ ought to offset some of that, less accountability too (or the terrorists will win).
Trump’s budget: beating Meals on Wheels vans into swords.
This horrific budget would make the US a global laughingstock. To save tiny sums that will immediately be spent on a useless wall, still more useless military toys, and tax cuts for rich folks he proposes to set back our scientific establishment by decades, to scrap our environment and to cripple our diplomacy and education projects at home and abroad, and to screw over the old and the sick in countless ways.
It’s because it’s hard for me to believe that someone could be so ignorant and thick that they wouldn’t recognize the effects that you describe that I keep returning to the notion that Trump must knowingly be a Russian tool.
It called blackmail. Hava nice day.
Its…
Considering what we know about these people that the public (and Congress) has demonstrated it does not care about, what could possibly be left to expose?
There is no Santa Clause. He’s been digitized.
The US will basically be in the position of Sherrif Bart taking himself hostage in Blazing Saddles, then shooting the hostage.
“Don’t laugh, you’re next!”
This is an embarrassing admission for me, as I pride myself on my invective-rich cynicism about Republicans in general and Trump in particular, but this actually managed to be worse than I expected. After the apparent wake-up call that the DOE doesn’t actually regulate oil wells, or whatever the fuck, I had some hope that we’d just quietly continue with the status quo. The gutting of the EPA and NASA, the elimination of the NEA … those I expected. The gutting of the DOE and the NIH, especially given the bipartisan support for the latter? Cutting them both by around 20% is bad news even as a starting position for negotiations. As Charlie Sweatpants observed, it’s going to be an awful new baseline for Democrats to work from, assuming they ever get back into power.
Isn’t other countries need to pay their fair share of defense costs at odds with we need to beef up our military? Ah fuck, why do I even bother.
Your mistake is, you expect them to make sense
If you view them as corrupt kleptocrats who have been caught by the Russians at {redacted} it makes perfect sense.
Isn’t other countries need to pay their fair share of defense costs at odds with we need to beef up our military?
Absolutely not. I can see why you might think that; it’s because you’re reasoning that the US military is supposed to defend the US and its allies. And if the defence of NATO requires, let’s say, 100 units of military strength, and right now the US is providing 70 and the rest of Nato is only supplying 30, if they went up to 50 then the US could go down a bit. And your logic makes sense given your original assumptions.
But that’s not what the US military is for (to the right wing). It isn’t a government department with certain responsibilities and a budget and scope that is set with reference to those responsibilities. It is a Magical Totem of National Strength. Saying that it doesn’t need to be any bigger because it isn’t doing anything is utterly missing the point; it’s like asking whether a bishop needs a crozier if he’s never actually going to round up any sheep. That’s not what the crozier is for. It just looks like it might be; but don’t be deceived.
Crusty says:
The GOP will need that additional “internal defense” when we natives become restless.
MSNBC airing ads locally: “Call your Representative now and tell him to vote yes on this new Spectacular GOP Healthcare Plan.”
Well, you’ve got to admit, it is spectacular–just not in a good way.
I often wonder if ads like this work, or are they just a way to keep consultants afloat in between elections.
Trump’s proposal eliminates funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Democrats in the region need to jump all over that, as if there wasn’t already enough to jump all over.
Environment = hippies = bad.
“Tribe” isn’t just newspaper shorthand for the Cleveland Indians.
That Canadian show that’s on NPR last night had a Republican from somewhere around the Great Lakes who was NOT happy that funding was going to be cut for the GLRI. Missing was any expression of dismay over the rest of the budget.
That might have been Portman, since I’ve heard from other sources that he opposes this cut.
IGM,FU.
Oh, wait, I don’t got mine? Shit, this ain’t RIGHT!
I thought the leopards were my friends!
They look so cute and pretty from a distance…
Though their lipstick was way too generously and sloppily applied.
/”lipstick”
By the way, I saw this posted over at Kevin Drum’s spot:
Why do these people never pay a price for shit like this? “Oh, yeah, I had no idea what the DoE does so I said we should eliminate it. Then I was picked to run it and I found out it’s, like, important and stuff so nevermind LOL.”
The least insane of the stooge squad detected.
It’s like a bad parody of a Republican government. If someone had written it into a fictional story, critics would ding it for being too ridiculous and over the top.
Sadly,
criticsour political media and many voterswoulddid ding it for being too ridiculous and over the top.And now, here we are.
Everyone will get to posture and prance, deplore and wax indignant and then government by continuing resolution will. . . . . .continue.
This is more eyewash for the wingnuts.
The local MSNBC was airing ads this morning about how fab TrumpCare is and that you should mobilize to support it (no details offered). My bad-so shocked forgot to note who sponsored it (HSS?).
Whew. The usual suspects…
->>The American Action Network, founded by veteran GOP fundraisers<–
Rebecca Solnit described this budget as creating “a fortress full of dying things.” That about sums it up, really.
Remember when Bill Clinton and Jeb Bush worked together to save the Everglades? I’m waiting for Trump’s proposal, with a fervently nodding Rick Scott standing behind him, to simply drain the whole damn thing, national park and all, and sell it to developers with Russian accents or the surname Trump.
I obviously agree with everything that’s being said in the OP and comments, but Stan Collender knows budgets, and he thinks this thing is both not a budget and is DOA.