Bad news
At first glance, the budget proposal that President Donald Trump sent to Congress this week holds plenty of bad news for Pennsylvania.
Consider:
n Trump’s budget would eliminate the federal Low Income Heating Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which provides financial assistance on heating bills. If enacted, it would cut off 345,000 Pennsylvanians, including 121,000 senior citizens and 67,000 families with children aged 6 years old and younger.
n Trump’s budget slashes funding for the U.S. Dept. of Education, cutting or eliminating funding for for teacher training, before- and after-school programs, and aid to tens of thousands of low-income and first-generation college students.
n The administration’s budget cuts funding to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, putting the burden back on states already dealing with funding problems of their own to ensure citizens have access to clean air and safe drinking water. In Pennsylvania, federal funding accounts for about a third, or $193 million, of the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Trump’s budget hurts those who can afford it least — the poor and the aged -who, ironically, were among his most passionate supporters.
But because Washington abhors a vacuum, it’s still entirely likely that vast portions of Trump’s spending plan will ever become law. And, again, in another delicious irony, it will be Republicans who bear the blame for it.
To get his budget passed, Trump will have to bypass The Sequester, the fiscal gatekeeper Congress approved just as the economy was beginning to slowly rebound in 2010.
The law imposed hard caps on defense and non-discretionary defense spending. To overcome an inevitable Senate filibuster to get rid of them, Trump would have to successfully woo Democrats to his cause.
Given the icy relations between the two sides, that’s a long-shot even in the Bizarro World parallel universe where such things are possible.
And were he ever to win Democrats, Trump would have to alter his spending framework so significantly that he’d sacrifice whatever Republican support he’d managed to garner for it, as Annie Lowry noted in a piece for The Atlantic last week.
“Show me the budget deal that would increase defense spending, lift the budget caps, keep all Republicans, and bring in eight [Senate] Democrats,” Todd Harrison, a military spending expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a foreign-policy think tank told Lowry, summing up the White House’s current dilemma. “It doesn’t exist.”
There is a budget agreement to be had, to be sure. But one that would pass both houses of Congress requires more fiscal and intellectual maturity than the current White House appears capable of mustering.
Trump has said he wants to trim government waste and make the federal government operate more efficiently.
That’s something even the most radical of Democrats would agree is a good idea. No one wants to see the taxpayers’ hard-earned money disappear down Washington’s drain.
But the plan Trump sent to Congress this week accomplishes little beyond harming the poor while handing massive tax breaks to the wealthy and further enriching the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about so many years ago. We hope Congress will move quickly past it and approve a budget that works for all Americans.
Patriot-News, Harrisburg