Trump's budget cuts, well, pretty much everything

Although Trump's budget is not expected to be passed, it reveals troubling things about the GOP's priorities

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published February 12, 2018 4:09PM (EST)

 (AP/Evan Vucci)
(AP/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump's new $4.4 trillion budget includes drastic cuts to Medicare and food stamps, even as it doesn't hesitate to increase spending on the military.

The new budget proposal — which would add $984 billion to the federal deficit next year and add an additional $7 trillion over the subsequent 10 years — would spend $200 billion on his infrastructure plan alone, according to The New York Times. The budget plan would also spend $85.5 billion on discretionary funding for veterans' health care, increase the Pentagon's budget by $80 billion and spend $13 billion to tackle opioid abuse.

At the same time, the budget would also cut $237 billion from Medicare, $2.8 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency (or 34 percent of its current budget), $757 million from federal Amtrak spending and reduce cash spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by roughly one third, according to Bloomberg. The SNAP cuts, which are intended to be paired with a program that sends hungry Americans foods "such as shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and meat, poultry or fish," are intended to save $214 billion over the next decade.

There are other programs that have been slated to get cut entirely, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Global Climate Change Initiative, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The budget also attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare, something that the Trump administration failed to do in Congress last year.

It's worth noting that, although the budget does establish both Trump's and the Republican Party's larger legislative priorities, the current proposal is widely expected not to pass. Budget proposals are, as Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C. put it to The Washington Post, "aspirational documents and seldom have a real impact on spending."

Experts have taken to Twitter to denounce Trump's budget proposal.


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Budget Donald Trump Food Stamps Gop Health Care Infrastructure Medicare Spending