The president’s budget makes clear what matters most to the president and represents the White House’s negotiating position for the future of the United States government. It’s a statement of intent.
Trump’s 2020 budget makes clear that his highest priority is a racist border wall that Americans don’t want or need. Despite public and Congressional pushback, Trump requested $8.6 billion in border wall funding.
At the same time, the budget also proves that Trump is willing to declare all-out war on American health care—and he’ll break as many promises as he needs to in order to do it. The budget proposes:
- Essentially no increase in opioid funding, despite Trump’s promises to combat the epidemic
- $5 billion in cuts to the NIH budget in 2020, including massive cuts to HIV and cancer research, despite Trump’s recent promise to end HIV/AIDS
- ACA repeal without any viable alternative, despite Trump’s repeated promises to repeal and replace. Over the next decade, Trump’s budget would cut $777 billion in funding from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
- After repeatedly promising to protect Medicare as a candidate, Trump makes changes to Medicare that would shrink the program by $845 billion over the coming decade.
The budget also proposes cuts to the Department of Transportation (so much for Infrastructure Week), $220 billion in cuts to SNAP (which provides nutrition assistance to millions of Americans), and $207 billion in cuts to student aid. In all, the budget cuts domestic programs by 9 percent (or 11 percent, adjusting for inflation), leaving a huge shortfall for national priorities while wealthy corporations enjoy their Trump tax cuts.
The budget slashes the Environmental Protection Agency by nearly one-third and funding for renewable energy research and innovation by more than two-thirds.
Meanwhile, the 2020 budget proposal increases military spending and projects a deficit increase of $4.3 trillion over the next four years—even as it relies on phony projections. As the #GOPTaxScam, Trump’s only legislative accomplishment thus far, continues to blow up the deficit with no tangible economic benefit, programs upon which the American people depend are being slashed and drained.
It’s no wonder that just 39% of voters think Trump cares about average Americans.
THE LOBBYISTS OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.
Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” is looking even more pathetic than before. New reporting from the Washington Post shows that over 350 former lobbyists currently work in, have worked in, or have been nominated to work in the Trump administration.
The administration is a veritable who’s who of lobbyists:
- Cumulatively, the Trump administration’s lobbyists have represented more than 2,800 companies.
- Nearly 50 former lobbyists work or have worked in the executive office.
- “Nearly 200 of them now serve or have been nominated to serve in divisions of government they once lobbied.”
The Trump administration’s pay-to-play #CultureOfCorruption becomes more evident by the day. David Bernhardt, Trump’s new nominee to serve as Secretary of the Interior, is a perfect manifestation of this slimy culture. According to the Center for American Progress, Bernhardt is the most conflicted nominee in Trump’s cabinet—and that’s saying something.
And he’s not the only one. Trump’s EPA Administrator is a former coal lobbyist. His HHS secretary is a former pharma lobbyist. The previous communications director was the head of Fox News programming for more than a decade. Sense a pattern?