Trump Budget Disinvests in America’s Future

Through a budget proposal announced this week, President Donald Trump continues his attacks on vital programs for working families, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

And rather than invest in America’s future, he seeks to disinvest, proposing deep funding cuts to programs in education, environmental protection, disease prevention and more.

The winners of this $4.8-trillion scheme are not America’s forgotten men and women, whom Trump vowed to stand up for, but the wealthy few: the budget cuts are needed to pay for the continuation of the Trump/GOP tax cuts that benefitted the richest 1% and corporations. These tax cuts continue to balloon the deficit and contribute to growing income inequality.

“Yet again, the Trump administration is proposing to pay for the president’s tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaires by gutting vital programs that working families rely on to help keep a roof over their head and put food on the table,” said AFSCME President Lee Saunders, describing Trump’s budget as “cruel” and calling on Congress to stand up for working families.

“As the gap between the richest 1% and everyone else grows wider every day,” Saunders continued, “we should improve public education, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and strengthen labor rights so that workers have a voice on the job to advocate for better wages, benefits and working conditions that improve entire communities.”

Among other attacks on working families, AFSCME’s research shows that Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2021 would:

• increase America’s military spending – already the highest in the world – to $740.5 billion in next fiscal year;
• waste $2 billion more on building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, despite bipartisan opposition in Congress;
• slash spending by $4.4 trillion over a decade, targeting $2 trillion in savings from life-line programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts and $70 billion from federal disability benefits under Social Security;
• cut $15.3 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps millions of people;
• enact deep cuts to programs in the departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Labor, Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, and Housing and Urban Development;
• make deep cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even amid the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

Even as Trump seeks to decimate programs that invest in America’s future and save millions of lives every year, he is setting money aside to … put astronauts back on the moon.

Good thing Congress intends to “stand firm against this president’s broken promises and his disregard for the human cost of his destructive policies,” as the chairman of the House Budget Committee, John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), put it.