The man who lost the popular vote for president unveiled a budget that would negatively impact everyone in the country. The result is editorial boards across America are panning his cruel, short-sighted budget. First up, The New York Times:
This document is at once scary and uninformative. Taken at face value, it would impose pain for pain’s sake. Looked at more broadly, it tees up spending cuts that will be needlessly deep in order to accommodate tax cuts.
The Tampa Bay Times:
President Donald Trump is now saying the border wall that he promised Mexico would pay for will be paid for another way — by stripping away the defenses that protect Florida and the entire Gulf Coast from the threat of hurricanes, drug trafficking and natural disasters. This is one of the most irresponsible ideas from the new administration, and Congress should insist on a smarter approach that doesn't endanger national security in the guise of promoting it.
The Kansas City Star:
The two most stunning things about the federal budget proposal issued by the Trump administration Thursday are these:
Domestically, its cuts would fall hardest on low-income Americans in rural areas, aka Trump voters.
It also slashes funding for diplomacy, foreign aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development and United Nations peacekeepers during what the U.N. has called the gravest humanitarian crisis since 1945. Would the world then hear from us only with bombs?
The Roanoke Times:
Here’s who should be concerned about the proposed elimination of the Appalachian Regional Commission: Anyone who’s interested in trying to build a new economy in Appalachia. That means a whole lot of people who voted for Trump. [...] You can argue, of course, that maybe federal spending is so out of control that Trump’s budget cuts are necessary. For argument’s sake, let’s accept that and look at trade-offs. The Appalachian Regional Commission asked for $120 million in funding for the coming year. Trump wants to increase funding for charter schools by $168 million. He wants to increase defense spending by $54 billion. Let’s not even talk about defense. It sure looks like Trump just said charter schools — which, if they’re going to work, are going to primarily be in metro areas — are more important than Appalachia’s economy. That’s not exactly making Appalachia great again.
The Denver Post:
Trump’s Mexican border wall has a price tag, and it’s the American people paying $2.6 billion “to plan, design and construct a physical wall along the southern border.” Another $1.5 billion would beef up deportation efforts. Those are misplaced priorities at best, and at worst hurtful political rhetoric made policy reality.
Comparatively, the budget allocates only $314 million to “recruit, hire, and train 500 new border patrol agents, and 1,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement law enforcement personnel.” Those investments seem far more justifiable than a wall or deportation efforts, and increased border patrol could be an important part of any compromise for needed immigration reforms.
Trump may have intended his budget to be a low-ball opening bid that spurs negotiation, but instead it is a laughable offer that should make both Republicans and Democrats walk away from the negotiating table. Congress should set out on its own path for a responsible budget.
The News & Observer:
It’s hard to know how much President Trump had to do with specifics, both because he’s not a “details guy” and he has few entrenched political beliefs. But the right-wing conservatives around the president are getting their way, cutting out funding for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. As a result, there will be cuts at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art.
Welcome, it might be said, to Trump World, where the ideology of the president’s advisers has topped good sense and even savvy political strategy in the name of keeping the president’s on-the-stump promises. Considering Trump’s penchant for stretching the truth, this sudden interest in keeping his word is quite a twist.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
The Trump administration, in service of its goal of raising military spending by $52 billion, hopes to cut the EPA’s $8.2 billion budget by 31 percent. Congress is unlikely to go along with that, because here’s the EPA’s dirty little secret:
Most of EPA’s spending isn’t on climate change research, though that will certainly be gone. Most of its money is spent on grants to state and local governments for a variety of clean water, clean air and environmental cleanup programs. Grants to small-town and big city water and sewage systems and industrial site cleanups would be reduced.
Out where people live, they like clean air and water. If Republicans gut the EPA budget, they’ll find that out.
Michael Schear at The New York Times explains how Trump’s budget will be a disaster for his base:
The approach is a risky gamble for Mr. Trump, whose victory in November came in part by assembling a coalition that included low-income workers who rely on many of the programs that he now proposes to slash. For now, the president and his advisers appear willing to take that risk by casting the administration as better caretakers of taxpayers’ money. “We are trying to focus on both recipients of the money and the folks who give us the money in the first place,” Mr. Mulvaney said.
If the president gets his way, funding for the environment, diplomacy, housing, health services and the arts will be cut 20 to 30 percent. In 19 cases, funding will be eliminated, including for the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Military spending would increase by $54 billion, a 10 percent rise, in 2018, in addition to a $30 billion increase in the current year.
Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast:
The ARC had a budget of around $120 million in 2016, and here are some of the indefensible projects it wasted that coal miner’s money on. Around $3 million in regional development and planning programs for West Virginia. Numerous other grants ranging from around $1 million to as much as $7 million or so to help small towns in depressed counties develop tourism, build rail links, expand airports, fund local health departments, erect city parks and amphitheaters, construct access roads, improve water systems…
In other words, socialism of every evil variety you can name.
I should note that Barack Obama, the man who supposedly hates West Virginians proposed a 5.5 percent increase in his 2016 budget in the ARC’s development budget. It’s Donald Trump, toasted like Caesar there, who’s proposing to do away entirely with the agency that in 2015 spent $7 million making water-system improvements and without whose help over these last five decades that poor state’s poor towns and counties would be in far worse shape than they are.
That’s just Appalachia. Trump’s budget is going to hit Trump’s voters everywhere, and hard. As long as he keeps braying about foreigners and stuff, it’ll take people a while to notice. But they will. One thing I agree with Trump on: These people aren’t dumb. He’ll soon learn that.
Jordan Weissmann at Slate:
The budget plan that the Trump administration released Thursday is a sad, vicious, and mostly pointless document, the political and policy equivalent of shouting “America First!” to the wind while gunning your Dodge pickup into a lamppost. In order to fund a $54 billion increase in defense spending, it takes a machete to all manner of federal programs—aid for the poor and elderly, cancer research, public television, job training, and so forth. It gouges away 31 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's budget and 29 percent of the State Department's funding. This would all be horrifying, if it weren't already being written off by Republicans who will have the power to entirely ignore it.
Philip Bump at The Washington Post has a day in the life of a poor person under Trump’s plan. Spoiler: it’s even more miserable than you’d imagine.
John Cassidy at The New Yorker:
Fortunately, there is little chance of this proposal making it far on Capitol Hill, where individual appropriation bills often require sixty votes. “You don’t have fifty votes in the Senate for most of this, let alone sixty,” Steve Bell, a former Republican budget aide who is now an analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told the Wall Street Journal. “There’s as much chance that this budget will pass as there is that I’m going to have a date with Elle Macpherson.”
That’s reassuring, but the White House’s proposal can’t be dismissed entirely. It shows what you get when you combine the crass America First jingoism of Trump with the drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub philosophy of the House Republicans: a Voldemort budget.
And on a final note, here’s Eugene Robinson’s take:
President Trump’s first budget is an attempt to reshape the federal government in his own image — crass, bellicose, shortsighted, unserious and ultimately hollow. Unsurprisingly, Trump titled it “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again.” The reality is that if Congress were to accept these numbers — which it can’t possibly do — America would be made dumber, dirtier, hungrier and sicker. That may be Trump’s idea of greatness, but it’s certainly not mine.