Budget breakdown:
How various programs would fare.
President Trump’s first budget outline addresses some of his campaign promises — more support for the military and construction of a wall on the Mexican border — but reneges on commitments he made to the blue-collar workers whose support helped him win.
When Trump accepted the GOP nomination for president last July, he promised to help Americans who “have been ignored, neglected and abandoned . ... These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice,” Trump said. “I am your voice.”
But the 2018-19 budget outline released Thursday proposes cutting programs designed to help lower income and rural Americans. Among those proposed for trims are the block grant that supports the Meals on Wheels program for seniors; money that helps provide healthy food to poor women who use the Women, Infants and Children program; and subsidies for home heating oil.
“Meals on Wheels sounds great,” White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said. “... to take the federal money and give it to the states and say, look, we want to give you money for programs that don’t work. I can’t defend that anymore.”
But peer-reviewed scientific research, including a 2014 study published in Nutrition and Health, concluded home-delivered meal programs for seniors “improve diet quality and increase nutrient intakes among participants.”
This is Trump’s second major policy proposal that takes aim at his core supporters. In an interview Wednesday night on Fox News, the president acknowledged that a Bloomberg analysis showed voters in counties that supported him would receive about a third of the benefit of the tax cuts in his health care proposal than would voters in counties that backed Hillary Clinton.
To the Trump faithful, the fiscal outline fulfills his promise to strengthen the military but trim spending. Those trims include programs that support the arts, medical and science research, public transportation, environmental protection and anything to do with addressing climate change.