Strictly speaking, the “skinny budget” that the White House published on Thursday isn't 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 doesn't include any projections for the deficit. And a Presidential budget isn’t 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 President's political philosophy. “Philosophy” isn’t a word often associated with Donald Trump, but this partial budget outline—the White House is promising to release a fuller version later—accurately reflects the impulses, prejudices, and slogans that animated Trump's 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 it’s 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” America's military and secure its borders. But the White House provided few details of how the Pentagon would spend the extra fifty-four billion dollars Trump wants it to receive, or of how it might reallocate resources within the rest of its budget, which is already bigger than Sweden's 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 homebound 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 they’re there.
Many poor rural counties would also see cuts. While Trump 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 the Rural Business-Cooperative Service, which promotes rural development and the spread of coöperatives. 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 region’s Delta Regional Authority.
In the long term, the prosperity of the country as a whole depends on 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 Trump's 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, he is proposing to eliminate a Labor Department program that provides on-the-job retraining 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 Energy's 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 agency's budget figure isn't 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 Post's Philip Kennicott and Peggy McGlone pointed 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 America's 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. Trump’s budget would kill a program to clean up some of the nation's grandest waterways, including the Great 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 didn't say how this would be allocated.
Most, if not all, of these domestic policy cuts are unnecessary and shortsighted. Then there are the deliberate assaults on anything that smacks of internationalism, or of a benign and coöperative 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 to do some good. These include the Africa Development Foundation, an independent organization that provides grants to small businesses and community groups in some of the world's poorest countries, and the Institute 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 America's “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 harm’s way,” more than a hundred retired generals wrote in a public letter last month.
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.