Closing of Appalachia agency is hard to figure
Appalachian Ohio helped Donald Trump capture the White House. But for whatever reason, Trump’s proposed federal budget would abolish the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal agency that since the 1960s has helped spur economic development and community improvements in parts of Ohio and 11 other states — and throughout West Virginia.
The officially defined Appalachian region, according to commission data, encompasses 420 counties, almost 250,000 square miles — and 25 million people. Among those 420 Appalachian counties are 32 of Ohio’s. Last fall, Trump carried 30 of Ohio’s 32. (Hillary Clinton carried Mahoning and Athens counties.)
Matter of fact, data drawn from Dave Leip’s indispensable Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections suggests that Donald Trump carried nearly every county the Appalachian Regional Commission serves. In contrast, it appears that, including Mahoning and Athens counties, Clinton only carried 19 of the nation’s 420 Appalachian counties, fewer than 5 percent.
Why exactly the Appalachian commission is in the Trump administration’s crosshairs is hard to fathom. Maybe it’s a beginner’s mistake, because it certainly isn’t politically smart. Of the 2.8 million Ohioans who voted for Trump in November, at least 500,000 voted in Ohio’s Appalachian counties.
Ohio’s U.S. senators, Democrat Sherrod Brown of Cleveland and Rob Portman of suburban Cincinnati, have jointly asked Trump to bolster rather than prune the federal agency: “Discontinuing programs such as (the Appalachian Regional Commission) would undermine the progress we have witnessed in Appalachia over the last few decades and have a detrimental impact on our constituents in the region,” Portman and Brown said in their letter to the president. “We urge you to reconsider your decision to eliminate this essential program and encourage you instead to consider ways in which the Commission could be expanded to ensure continued progress in Appalachia.”
According to a congressional study, national media coverage of 1960’s contest between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary drew attention to the Appalachian region’s economic plight. Kennedy, once in the White House, created a presidential commission on Appalachia in 1963. Then in 1965, during Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, Congress established today’s Appalachian Regional Commission.
Granted, the perils the commission’s abolition might bring to Appalachian Ohio would be less damaging than the most dangerous threat to Ohioans, statewide — congressional repeal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and with that the likely demise of Republican Gov. John R. Kasich’s expansion of Medicaid to provide health-care coverage to Ohio’s working poor.
But congressional Republicans, at least, have been threatening to roll back the ACA and Medicaid expansion for a long time. In contrast, the fact that a Trump presidency could mean the end of the Appalachian Regional Commission had to be unexpected news, bad news, in the 30 Ohio Appalachian Ohio that Trump carried in November on his way to the White House.
Follow-up: As noted last month, Kennedy, speaking as president in 1962 at an Ohio Democratic Party dinner in Columbus, wryly griped that, “There is no city in the United States in which I get a warmer welcome and less votes than Columbus, Ohio!”
A reach into the history hutch help nail down details. Columbus voters gave Republican Richard M. Nixon 98,087 votes to Democrat Kennedy’s 82,227 votes. That is, Kennedy drew 45 percent of Columbus’s presidential vote. (Nixon carried Ohio, attracting 53 percent of the Buckeye State’s vote.) In Cincinnati, Kennedy beat Nixon by fewer than 2,000 votes. But Kennedy won 54 percent of Dayton’s and Akron’s vote, 55 percent of Toledo’s, 68 percent of Youngstown’s — and 70 percent of Cleveland’s.