Trump budget to hit EPA, State hard
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year would slash the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent and cut State Department 28 percent in a brash gesture of disdain for big government, according to congressional staff members 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 but vague campaign themes into the black and white of spending priorities.
The president would funnel $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.
“You can’t drain the swamp and leave all of the people in it,” Mick Mulvaney, the White House’s budget director, said during a briefing Wednesday.
Yet for all its headlinegrabbing bold strokes — and the White House claims that it will reset the process of Washington 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 reviewing the plan late Wednesday. Among the cuts: drastic 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 at 7 a.m. today is a “skinny budget,” a pared-down 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.
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 complete elimination of the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds popular programs like Meals on Wheels.
Health and Human Services funding would be cut by 17.9 percent. Funding to several smaller government agencies that have long been targets of conservatives — like the Legal Services Corporation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts — would be axed entirely.
The cuts to the EPA total $2.6 billion and would be accomplished, in part, by cutting about 3,200 positions, about a fifth of the department’s workforce.
That would mean eliminating funding for climate change research, closing state environmental programs and ending regional projects like the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which has bipartisan support. The $300 million per-year program is designed to clean up the Great Lakes.
Trump would also cut funding to the United Nations for its climate change efforts, and curb contributions to its peacekeeping efforts. Contributions to the World Bank would be cut by $650 million, and economic and development assistance would be “refocused” to countries of greatest strategic interest to the United States.
The brunt of the cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services would be at the National Institutes of Health, the country’s medical research hub. The $403 million that is currently used for training nurses and other medical professionals also would be eliminated.
The U.S. spends more than half a trillion dollars on defense, more than the next seven countries combined. But Trump has signaled he will boost defense spending by $54 billion.
Preliminary reports on the budget show some domestic Cabinet agencies, such as the departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, would see increases, including $3 billion for Trump’s promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
People familiar with the budget say the White House is seeking a 30 percent cut from an Energy Department office that promotes energy efficiency and renewable energy. The office has funded research on projects such as LED light bulbs, electric trucks, advanced batteries and biofuels.
The Energy Department could see steep cuts for its 17 national laboratories, which conduct cutting-edge research on topics from nuclear power to advanced materials for energy generation, storage and use.
Environmentalists also were dealt a blow Wednesday when Trump, speaking
at an automotive testing center in Ypsilanti, Mich., announced that his administration will re-examine federal requirements governing the fuel efficiency of cars and trucks.
The EPA under President Barack Obama had promulgated a rule for cars and trucks requiring a fleet-wide average of 36 mpg in real-world driving by 2025. Trump’s decision, while having no immediate effect, requires the EPA to determine no later than April 2018 whether the 2022-2025 standards established are appropriate.
Trump told the auto executives that while he’s attuned to concerns about the environment, he doesn’t want to stifle jobs.
“We want you to make great cars. And if it takes an extra thimble full of fuel, we don’t want that to stop making it,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a tiny amount of fuel. It’s a very small thing we’re talking about.”
After the speech, Trump flew to Nashville, Tennessee, where he laid a wreath at Andrew Jackson’s tomb to mark the 250th anniversary of the former president’s birth. During the campaign, some of Trump’s aides compared him to the former president — a fellow populist outsider. In brief remarks outside Jackson’s home, The Hermitage, Trump said the former president opposed the “arrogant elite” and asked the audience: “Does that sound familiar to you?”
Trump held a campaign rally in the city afterward.