March 16, 2017
The dark and dangerous priorities of the Trump Administration are laid bare in its first budget submission. The winners are military contractors and tough guy ideologues. The losers are the American people.
Anyone who harbored hopes of investment in jobs and opportunity for working class families will be bitterly disappointed. On its own and taken together with the gutting of health coverage supported by the President, this partial budget will impose high costs on people struggling to get by and do better. The budget is said to significantly cut work-study for college students. It would eliminate home heating and cooling assistance for low-income seniors and families, a program that has helped poor seniors by preventing them from having to choose between heat and medicines or food. It would cut K-12 education funding for low-income students. It cuts the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program (WIC). It cuts job training programs. These are only a few of the opportunity-crushing proposals put forth by the Trump Administration today. For Americans hungering for more economic security and the chance at a stable middle class life, these cuts show contempt.
The impact of these deep cuts in programs that serve low- and moderate-income people, especially when added to the losses inflicted on the same people by the Trump-supported health coverage repeal bill, will be to dramatically worsen inequality. Poor children and seniors will have less nutritious food. Hundreds of thousands fewer will get help with their rent. Education funds that ought to strengthen public school systems will be diverted so a relative few families can get subsidies to attend private schools. Low-income people seeking protection against rampant eviction proceedings and needing representation in other matters will be hit hard by the proposed elimination of the Legal Services Corporation. The effective anti-poverty work of community action agencies nationwide would be crippled by the elimination of the Community Services Block Grant.
Trump priorities would set in motion a massive disinvestment in our future, denying poor children the education, health care, and nutrition they need to thrive, denying youth access to college, slashing development projects in low-income communities and limiting scientific and medical research that can lead to tomorrow’s cures and jobs.
In this budget, children, seniors and working families pay so that the Pentagon can speed up the purchase of the failing F-35 striker planes. Military contractors appear to benefit far more than the American people do. In the Trump-supported health care bill, the insurance and medical industries as well as wealthy people gain hundreds of billions of dollars while 24 million people lose health insurance and many more will see their costs increase. The Trump priorities are clear, and they are putting our future at risk.
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