Donald Trump’s Voldemort Budget – The New Yorker
The White Houses proposed budget represents a wish list and a numerical expression of the President's political philosophy.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX WONG / GETTY
Strictly speaking, the skinny budget that the White Housepublished on Thursday isnt a budget at all. It says nothing about roughly three-quarters of over-all federal spending, which goes to mandatory outlays such as Social Security, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt. It doesnt include any projections for the deficit. And a Presidential budget isnt binding. Ultimately, Congress sets spending levels. As Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, said on Thursday morning, this is just the very start of the budget process.
What a Presidential budget really represents is a wish list and a numerical expression of the Presidents political philosophy. Philosophy isnt a word often associated with Donald Trump, but this partial budget outlinethe White House is promising to release a fuller version lateraccurately reflects the impulses, prejudices, and slogans that animated Trumps campaign. Indeed, his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, has said that he saw his job as taking what Trump said on the stump and translating it into figures.
In carrying out this task, Mulvaney performed a public service of sorts. Thanks to his translation, the entire world can see what America would look like if Trumpism were fully converted into practice. The country would be an uglier, less equal, less prosperous, more paranoid, more myopic, and more mean-spirited place. Its claims that its a role model for other countries would be besmirched, perhaps beyond redemption. And far from being rendered great again, it would be a weaker world power.
Trump claims the opposite, of course. He says that his goal is to rebuild Americas military and secure its borders. But the White House provided few details of how the Pentagon would spend the extrafifty-four billion dollars Trump wants it to receive, or of how it might reallocate resources withinthe rest of itsbudget, which is already bigger than Swedens G.D.P.
To pay for this military buildup, plus the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico, Trump would slash the budgets of many other federal agencies. The blueprint calls for a cut of thirty-one per cent at the Environmental Protection Agency; twenty-nine per cent at the State Department; twenty-one per cent at the Agriculture Department and Labor Department; sixteen per cent at the Commerce Department; fourteen per cent at the Energy Department; and thirteen per cent at the Transportation Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Many of the budget cuts would be felt directly by the poor and needy.At the Department of Housing, for example, Trump would eliminate the three-billion-dollar Community Development Block Grant program, which helps big cities pay for affordable housing, slum clearance, and many other things, including the delivery of hot meals to home-bound seniors.At the Department of Education, cuts would be made to two programs designed to prepare low-income students for college, and to a work-study program that helps those students pay their way through school once theyre there.
Many poor rural counties would also see cuts. WhileTrump would leave in place the subsidies that the Department of Agriculture provides to Big Agra, he would scale back programs aimed at small farmers and workers, such as theRural Business-Cooperative Service, which promotes rural development and the spread of coperatives. The budget would also eliminate a number of federal agencies charged with spurring development in specific deprived areas of the country, many of which voted for Trump. The Appalachian Regional Commission would be killed; so would the Mississippi River regions Delta Regional Authority.
In the long term, the prosperity of the country as a whole depends on it having a skilled labor force; world-beating science, technology, and arts; first-rate public infrastructure; and a clean and healthy environment. This budget, if it ever went into effect, would undercut all of these things.
After all Trumps talk about deindustrialization and carnage in middle America, some observers might have expected him to provide more financial assistance for displaced workers who want to find new jobs. Instead, heis proposing to eliminate aLabor Department program that provides on-the-job re-training for people older than fifty-five. The budget would also shrink the Job Corps, which provides workplace training for disadvantaged youths.
Trump would reduce by a fifth the budget of the National Institutes of Health, which finances the basic scientific research that spurs the health-care, pharmaceutical, and biotech industries.The Department of Energys Office of Science, which supports research into clean-energy alternatives, would also take a big hit. So, it seems, would the grant-making National Science Foundation, although the latter agencys budget figure isnt broken out.
Adding to the vandalism, the budget would eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which supports museums and libraries all across the country. As the Washington Posts Philip Kennicott and Peggy McGlonepointed out, Federal dollars are used to leverage state, local and private funding that supports a complex network of arts organizations, educational entities, museums, libraries and public broadcasting affiliates. Eliminating federal funding, which is the linchpin of the cultural economy, could well have a multiplier effect.
During the campaign, Trump also talked a lot about rebuilding Americas infrastructure. That, too, now looks like empty rhetoric. His budget would cut funding for the Department of Transportation by thirteen per cent. Funding for long-distance Amtrak routes would be eliminated entirely. The air-traffic-control system would be privatized. And the amount of money going to other transit programs, including highway improvements, would be significantly reduced.
The E.P.A., which tries to preserve the natural environment and clean up man-made spills, would see the biggest cuts of all. Trumps budget would kill a program to clean up some of the nations grandest waterways, including theGreat Lakes and Chesapeake Bay. Money for the Superfund program, which cleans up the most toxic sites of all, would be slashed by a third. The Interior Department, which oversees the National Parks and other public lands, would get a twelve-per-cent cut, but the blueprint didnt say how this would be allocated.
Most, if not all, of these domestic policy cuts are unnecessary and shortsighted.Then there are thedeliberate assaults on anything that smacks of internationalism, or of a benign and coperative American presence in the world. Someone in the Trump Administration appears to have gone through the entire budget looking to eliminate funding for small entities that try todo some good.These include the Africa Development Foundation, an independent organization that provides grants to small businesses and community groups in some of the worlds poorest countries, and theInstitute of Peace, a nonpartisan organization, founded in 1984, that supports efforts to resolve violent conflict, promote gender equality, and strengthen the rule of law around the world.The budget would even eliminate a program co-founded by Bob Dole, who backed Trump in the Republican primary: the McGovern-Dole Food for International Education Program, which helps provide school meals and nutritional programs in impoverished nations.
What is the point of killing programs like these? Expenditures on diplomacy and foreign aid make up a very modest part of the over-all budget, and virtually all national-security experts agree that they promote Americas soft power: its ability to advance its interests without resorting to military force.The State Department, USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Peace Corps and other development agencies are critical to preventing conflict and reducing the need to put our men and women in uniform in harms way, more than a hundred retired generals wrote in apublic letterlast month.
Fortunately, there is little chance of this proposal making it far on Capitol Hill, where individual appropriation bills often require sixty votes.You dont 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.Theres as much chance that this budget will pass as there is that Im going to have a date with Elle Macpherson.
Thats reassuring, but the White Houses proposal cant 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.
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Donald Trump's Voldemort Budget - The New Yorker