From an article in Mother Jones entitled “The Trump Administration's Four Most Heartless Statements About the Budget”:
Meals on Wheels doesn't work. A reporter asked Mulvaney about proposed cuts to the Community Development Block Grant Program, which would lead to cuts on Meals on Wheels in some states. He responded that the program, which feeds elderly people, and ones like it are "just not showing results" and "don't work."
Afterschool programs for hungry kids don't work. Mulvaney said that afterschool programs that feed low-income kids don't help them do better in school. "There is no demonstrable evidence they are actually doing that," he claimed.
Fighting climate change is a rip-off. "We're not spending money on that anymore," Mulvaney said. "We consider that to be a waste of your money."
Starvation and famine? Yawn. Another reporter asked Mulvaney about the administration's plans to reduce spending on the United Nations and foreign aid, despite famine and starvation facing 20 million people—a "humanitarian crisis," according to the UN. "Are you worried that some of the most vulnerable people on earth will suffer?" the reporter asked. "We're absolutely reducing funding to the UN and to the various foreign aid programs," Mulvaney said. "That should come as a surprise to no one who watched the campaign."
Let’s balance that forced feeding with some fact-checking courtesy of a New York Times article, “Fact Check: Budget Director’s Claims That Programs Don’t Work”:
Mulvaney suggested that Meals on Wheels is ineffective.
“We can’t spend money on programs just because they sound good. And great, Meals on Wheels sounds great. Again, that’s a state decision to fund that particular portion, to take the federal money and give it to the states, and say look, we want to give you money for programs that don’t work. I can’t defend that anymore. We cannot defend that anymore.”
False. Meals on Wheels helps 2.4 million people each year, including 500,000 veterans and 226,000 older citizens in the three states Mr. Mulvaney specified. And a body of research shows that it does work.
. . .
“If you can provide these lower-cost programs and keep seniors out of nursing homes, that in essence will save money,” said Kali S. Thomas, a professor of health services at Brown University.
Dr. Thomas’s research showed that Medicaid spending could be reduced by $109 million if all states were to increase the population of people who received home-delivered meals by 1 percent.
. . .
The White House … propose[s] to eliminate the Community Service and Community Development Block Grants, two programs that provide assistance to antipoverty efforts. These are characterized by the budget as having little effect, but are used by many state and local Meals on Wheels programs to cover gaps in funding, said Jenny Bertolette, the vice president of communications at Meals on Wheels.
For example, the Meals on Wheels program in Berkeley County, W.Va. served more than 23,300 meals in 2016 for less than $4 a meal. While the Community Development Block Grant doesn’t represent a huge chunk of the organization’s annual funding, losing its $5,000 grant (equivalent to more than 1,000 meals) would matter for a nonprofit that has consistently operated at a net loss.
He criticized the Community Development Block Grant program overall.
“The C.D.B.G.s have been identified as programs since I believe the first, actually the second Bush administration as ones that were just not showing any results.”
This is exaggerated. Mr. Mulvaney stands on firmer ground with his criticism of Meals on Wheels’ funding source, but he goes too far in his unequivocal statement that the program doesn’t produce “any results.”
The 42-year-old program, administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, largely falls under the control of local grantees. This means spending can be tailored to the specific needs of a low-income area, said William Rohe, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Much has been written about wasteful spending in the program — take, for example, a martini bar and a Brazilian steakhouse in St. Joseph, Mo. On the other hand, the Community Development Block Grant also has helped tens of thousands of Americans find jobs, rehabilitate more than one million homes and finance projects like the Colorado Center for the Blind and the revitalization of downtown Allentown, Pa.
He asserted that after-school programs have no effect on performance.
“So, let’s talk about after-school programs generally. They’re supposed to be educational programs, right? And that’s what they’re supposed to do, they’re supposed to help kids who can’t — who don’t get fed at home, get fed so that they do better at school. Guess what? There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re actually doing that. There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re actually helping results, helping kids do better at school.”
This is misleading. While Mr. Mulvaney specified after-school meal programs, it’s unclear what he is referring to because the government program that does fund after-school nutrition is not specifically at risk (nor does it purport to “help kids do better at school”).
The budget does propose to cut 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which fund after-school programs for about 1.6 million children in high-poverty areas. While the vast majority provide snacks and meals, feeding children is not their core mission.
“It’s something they do, but let’s not miss their primary purpose,” said Heather Weiss of the Global Family Research Program, who has evaluated after-social programs for decades. “They were set up to provide safe environments for kids with learning opportunities of all sorts.”
. . .
… recent valuations show these programs do improve student performance. According to the community learning centers’ latest publicly available performance report, from 2011, the program hasn’t always met its annual performance targets, but participants did improve math and English grades by 30 to 40 percent every year across all grade levels.
Perhaps one of the most famous examples of the effectiveness of after-school programs is partly funded by 21st Century Community Learning Centers. Becoming a Man, an after-school program for Chicago Public Schools students, reduces violent-crime arrests by 50 percent and improves graduation rates by 19 percent.
If passed, this budget will end up being the most costly, in lives lost, lives ruined, and long term dollars and cents, of anything seen in many decades. They’d rather pay ten times what they claim they would save, paying for more poor-quality nursing homes, building more prisons, hiring more thugs to serve as police, and getting involved in intractable wars to distract from our domestic ills while setting up their undesirables to die fighting on foreign soil, die in their miserable jails, or die at the hands of their over-militarized police.
From a Politico story, “Trump’s budget ripped from Bannon’s nationalistic playbook”, Trump’s budget “ slashes deeply into the State Department, redirects funds toward the military, guts environmental and housing programs — and continues to run a nearly half-trillion-dollar deficit.” It goes on to say:
Every dollar of proposed cutbacks to domestic, diplomatic and international aid programs that Trump makes in the spending plan will go to boost defense and law enforcement funding.
The State Department, which is responsible for the international relations of the United States, Mulvaney said, would be cut by 28 percent. But, hey, you’ve got Rex Tillerson leading it, so maybe downsizing it is a good thing? And, after all, Donnie doesn’t need any help, with his excellent diplomatic skills.
Some domestic programs, such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Institute of Peace, the Chemical Safety Board, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports PBS and NPR, are on the chopping block for elimination entirely. Trump is pushing numerous such cuts, long sought by conservative Republicans, in the spending plan, while allocating “more money for things like private and public school choice,” Mulvaney said.
The budget would severely curtail climate change initiatives, including eliminating $250 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Global Climate Change Initiative.
The spending plan does seek to shrink numerous federal programs. The package would lead to mass layoffs at the Environmental Protection Agency, eliminating more than 50 programs at the agency as part of a steep 31 percent cut. The Department of Labor would be slashed by 21 percent and the overall budget of the Department of Health and Human Services cut by nearly 18 percent. The reduction to the National Institutes of Health would be even deeper.
The White House proudly circulated a story that said it was seeking a “historic contraction of the federal workforce.”
“There's a lot of programs that simply cannot justify their existence, and that's where we zeroed in,” Mulvaney said, referring specifically to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds anti-poverty programs nationwide, would be eliminated.
The Department of the Interior’s budget would shrink by 12 percent, HUD’s budget by 13.2 percent and the Department of Education's budget by 13 percent. The Department of Agriculture would face steep cuts too, of 21 percent.
The Trump budget allocates $54 billion more to defense and law enforcement programs than Congress approved this year, a roughly 10 percent increase, while cutting foreign aid as part of a reorientation that Trump has termed “America First.” Trump also asks for a $30 billion supplemental payment for national security and the border in the current year. Mulvaney said funding for the Department of Homeland Security would grow by approximately 6 percent.
Funding for the United Nations would be reduced as the United States would pledge not to pay for more than 25 percent of the costs of peacekeeping internationally. Funding for the World Bank would be pared back by $650 million, as well.
The budget also calls for American tax dollars to fund the construction of a wall along the southern border — despite Trump’s repeated campaign claims that Mexico would pay.
“It’s coming out of the Treasury,” Mulvaney said of a $1.5 billion request in the current year.
Speaking of the budget, Newt Gingrich praised Trump, saying, “We have never had anybody like him,” he added. “He’s one-third Andrew Jackson for disruption, one-third Theodore Roosevelt for energy, one third P.T. Barnum for salesmanship. If you weave those together you understand what Trump is.”
Such an understanding, for me, is not pretty.