President Trump’s FY ’18 discretionary budget blueprint shifts money without adding to the deficit.
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American health sciences are not faring well in an initial draft of President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal.
“The CDBG’s have been identified as programs since, I believe, the second Bush administration as ones that were just not showing any results”, Mulvaney said. Trump budget chief Mick Mulvaney engaged in a contentious exchange with reporters Thursday, as he defended cuts to the Meals on Wheels program for seniors. Numerous cuts it proposes are transparently created to play to Trump’s populist constituency rather than save any meaningful amount of money.
We’re not balancing the budget here. This downward trend stopped in 2001 after 9/11, and subsequent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 pushed up defense spending until Obama took office in 2009.
More than 50 environmental programs would be eliminate under the spending plan, including the Energy Star initiative.
“Working families deserve a budget that invests in their health and futures, boosts wages, helps them balance work and family life, and levels the playing field for them and their children to succeed”, Scott said in the release. It increased military spending by $54 billion, funding for charter schools by $168 million and funding for a private school choice program by $250 million, indicating these will be priorities for the administration in lieu of other programs. The Department of Homeland Security comes in a close second, with a 7% increase.
The Department of State, which includes the US Agency for International Development Foreign Aid, which is supposed to help National Security, would be cut by $10.6 billion, or 28 per cent.
The budget will include a $1.5bn request for pilot schemes to determine construction methods and locations for Mr Trump’s promised wall between the USA and Mexico.
Trump wants to eliminate more than 3,200 EPA jobs, representing more than 20 percent of the workforce. The Obama administration’s clean power plant program would go away. Furthermore, the Department of Energy will also receive nearly a 20 percent cut, meaning a reduction of $900 million to its budget allocation, from the total of $5 billion.
Trump’s budget also makes significant cuts to scientific research, especially climate change, which is the target of some of the deep cuts within the State Department.
Climate change can be a driver of instability and the Department of Defense must pay attention to potential adverse impacts generated by this phenomenon….
“This is an America-first budget”, Mulvaney said. “It is not a soft-power budget”.
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“I can’t justify them to the folks who are paying the taxes”.
