James Bovard BUDGET CUTS BANKROLL NEW WASTE
Savings should be reserved for taxpayers, not bureaucrats and bombs
President Trump’s proposed budget takes a big step towards draining the swamp in Washington. This is the first time since the Reagan era that a president has sought a wholesale demolition of boondoggles.
On the other hand, Trump’s defense and homeland security spending increases will squander bounties that should be reserved for taxpayers, not bureaucrats and bombs.
Regardless of whether Trump can cajole Congress into imposing the cuts, Americans should welcome candor on an array of programs that should have been decimated or abolished long ago:
The Housing and Urban Development budget takes one of the biggest hits — down $6 billion, or 13%. The administration aims to sharply cut spending on rental vouchers that are notorious for redistributing violent crime from public housing projects to previously safe urban and suburban neighborhoods.
Trump calls for abolishing both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The vast majority of spending for the arts comes from private pockets. America does not need a culture commissariat to give federal seals of approval to efforts that please Washington bureaucrats.
Trump recommends abolishing federal subsidies for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. When federally financed television and radio began, there were vastly fewer options on the television and radio dial. Considering the bounty that technology is delivering, there is no excuse for spending $445 million a year for news and cultural programming that is consistently biased in favor of Big Government.
Trump wants a 17% cut for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, according to The Wash
ington Post. The service nowadays prefers to play therapist instead of giving taxpayers the best information available. Last week, it realized that it had exaggerated likely snowfalls in the Northeast Corridor but refused to correct itself because it feared confusing folks.
Trump calls for sharply slashing the $1.5 billion budget for Food for Peace, America’s most destructive foreign aid program. For decades, foreign farmers have been bankrupted when U.S. government agencies dump crops in their nations at harvest time. But the program works out well for the U.S. farm lobby, the merchant marine and non-profit groups.
The Trump budget would slash Urban Area Security Initiative grants, which have paid for a latrine-on-wheels in Texas and sno-cone machines in Michigan. Also targeted for cuts is the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response, which dispatches TSA teams to pointlessly hassle bus and train passengers in “security theater” at its most absurd.
On the down side, the homeland security budget proposes to fizzle away billions of dollars on a border wall — a monument to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign that will have little or no impact on illegal immigration.
And Trump wants to devote almost all of the domestic savings into the Pentagon for a boost of $52-billion, or roughly 10%. Since 9/11, the Defense Department has been Washington’s sacred cow — regardless of how badly U.S. military interventions abroad turned out. A Pentagon advisory panel recently documented $125 billion in bureaucratic waste; Pentagon honchos quickly buried that report. The Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the Army made $6.5 trillion in erroneous adjustments to its general fund in 2015.
The specter overhanging Trump’s budget is the possibility that he could jettison his campaign promises and plunge the nation more deeply into conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. If that happens, federal spending could quickly soar out of control as it did in the George W. Bush administration. What is the point of draining the swamp if all the savings are poured down other budgetary rat holes?
Trump’s budget would be better if it included more corporate welfare targets — such as farm subsidies — on the hit list.
Regardless, his proposals are evoking screams of agony. A
Washington Post article fretted that under Trump’s budget, “government would be smaller and less involved in regulating life in America.”
Actually, there was an election, and the people who did not want their lives micromanaged by federal agencies won.