What Trump’s Budget Says About His Priorities

A U.S. official told CNN earlier this month that cuts would come from the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs and projects the fund programs at United Nations. “It’s the fastest-growing program, it grew tremendously under President Obama, it’s a very wasteful program and we want to try and fix that”. “We consider that a basic tie to his campaign”.

In the introduction of the blueprint, President Donald Trump also promises that his plan “increases funding to address violent crime and reduces opioid abuse; and puts America first by keeping more of America’s hard-earned tax dollars here at home”. Numerous cuts it proposes are transparently created to play to Trump’s populist constituency rather than save any meaningful amount of money. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget chief, has described it as a “hard power budget” that emphasizes military strength over diplomacy.

Sources inside the EPA have told CNN that they anticipate at least 25% in budget cuts, and possibly deeper. Instead, Trump went with 31 percent.

The proposed $1.15 trillion spending package for Fiscal Year 2018, which begins November 1, makes huge cuts from top to bottom on the domestic side while increasing Pentagon funding, which already represents the federal government’s largest area of expenditure, by 10 percent. The Trump budget also would cut programs that support coastal and marine management, research and education, including the Sea Grant, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He also wants to cut valuable State Department programs such as “Food for Peace” that sends money to poor countries hit by war or natural disaster, and a program to subsidize flights to rural airports. Of course, all of these cuts are part of the plan to being gathering the funds to pay for the proposed wall between the United States and Mexico.

“Money talks, and Trump’s budget proposal screams that the only thing that matters in his America is corporate polluters’ profits and Wall Street billionaires”, said the Sierra Club’s executive director Michael Brune. “And yet, the Trump budget is focused on “protecting” America from global terrorists, who kill fewer Americans every year than falling televisions”.

Environmentalists are counting on Congress to override much of what is being proposed. “The drastic cuts proposed would destabilize our efforts to increase economic mobility and housing stability in every Boston neighborhood”, Walsh in a statement.

The Paul Ryan wing will complain that Trump is not undermining Social Security and Medicare, as Ryan himself has long advocated.

The last three could take big hits if Trump’s budget were to be approved. According to the budget, the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department stand to see massive cuts, whereas the Department of Defense, the VA, and Homeland Security all will see an uptick in funding.