President Trump’s latest budget proposal cuts spending with more abandon than purpose. The administration’s plan slashes expenditures not to tame deficits, recognize economic realities or enable investments. These are cuts for their own sake, ending programs and services as an end in itself.
Trump’s budget would shrink spending on the Environmental Protection Agency by 26%, the U.S. Agency for International Development by 22% and the Department of Housing and Urban Development by 15%. It would reduce health care subsidies under Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by $1 trillion, food stamps by $181 billion and disability programs by $75 billion over the next decade.
While a deadly virus is threatening a global pandemic, the administration proposes a 16% cut to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With the Democratic presidential candidates debating how to stem $1.5 trillion in outstanding higher education debt, it would reduce subsidized college loans and eliminate debt forgiveness for teachers and others in public-service professions. As the Food and Drug Administration grapples with the spread of vaping, it would strip nicotine regulation from the agency entirely and turn it over to a new bureaucracy within the Department of Health and Human Services — which, by the way, faces a 9% cut.
Despite all these cuts, Trump intends to ask Congress for an additional $2 billion for his border wall as well as bump up military spending.
Remarkably, the White House prescribes all this slashing and burning without managing to improve the fiscal condition of the federal government. The budget deficit is poised to cross the trillion-dollar mark this year at a time when, as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell noted Tuesday, the government should be reducing the shortfall.
And yet Trump’s spending plan abandons the goal of closing the deficit within a decade, purporting to do so in 15 years only by forecasting levels of economic growth that the administration has never achieved.
Even with these rosy assumptions, the plan would more than double the Trump administration’s roughly $3 trillion contribution to the national debt by the end of 2024, much of it through tax cuts.
The reality is that no one — Trump, the Democratic-controlled House or the GOP-held Senate — has any interest in tackling a chronic budget gap that forces the government to borrow 22 cents of every dollar it spends.
Congress’ penchant for ignoring presidential budgets limits their practical impact. As such, the Trump administration’s spending proposal should be read as a statement of cruel and reckless intentions.
