Trump budget cuts money for EPA and State Department,
President Donald Trump’s budget blue- print for the coming fiscal year would slash the Envi- ronmental Protection Agency by 31 percent and cut State
Department spending by a similar amount in a brash gesture of disdain for big government, according to congressional staff mem- bers familiar with the plan.
The budget outline, to be unveiled today, is more of a broad political statement than a detailed plan for spending and taxation. But it represents Trump’s first real effort to translate his broad campaign themes into the black and white of spending priorities.
The president would fun- nel $54 billion in additional funding into defense programs, beef up immigration enforcement and significantly reduce the nondefense federal workforce to “dismantle the administrative state,” in the words of Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon.
Yet for all its headline-grabbing bold strokes — and the White House claims that it will reset the process of Wash- ington policymaking — major elements of the plan have already been declared dead on arrival by the Republican leadership in Congress, and much of the fiscal fine print will be filled in by Capitol Hill lawmakers and their aides over the next month.
House appropriations subcommittees began review
ing the plan late Wednesday. Among the cuts: dras- tic reductions in the 60-yearold State Department Food for Peace Program, which sends food to poor countries hit by war or natural disasters, and the elimination of the Department of Transportation’s Essential Air Service program, which subsidizes flights to rural airports.
The plan to be released is a “skinny budget,” a pareddown first draft of the line-byline appropriations request submitted by first-term administrations during their first few months.
A broader budget will be released later in the spring that will include Trump’s proposals for taxation as well as the bulk of government spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs.
Issues with coordination plagued Wednesday’s briefing sessions: Republican com- munications staff members, who usually coordinate their messaging, complained that they had been given no White House guidance on its details or how to sell the plan, which covers the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1.
In addition to the cuts at the EPA and the State Department, Trump’s team is expected to propose a wide array of cuts to public education, to transportation programs like Amtrak and to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including the elimination of the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds popular programs like Meals on Wheels, housing assistance and other community assistance efforts.
In recent years, far smaller proposed cuts to the popular grant program, which includes flexible funding for a variety of housing and community projects, created a bipartisan uproar that nearly scuttled the entire bud- get-making process.
The EPA is, arguably, the hardest-hit agency under Trump’s budget proposal: He wants to cut spending by nearly a third — $2.6 billion from its current level of $8.2 billion, according to a person who had been briefed on the proposal but was not authorized to speak publicly about it.
That would take the budget down to its lowest level in 40 years, adjusted for inflation.
The proposed State Department cuts have already created a backlash among some Capitol Hill Republicans.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already said Senate Republicans will not agree to deep cuts to the $50 billion budget for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development that were ini- tially proposed.