On Friday, the Trump administration submitted its annual budget request to Congress. The document called for dramatically reducing what the United States government does for Americans. The budget called for steep cuts to funding for education, housing and health, funneling resources toward the military as the war in Iran reaches its fifth week. This shift would leave the portion of the budget known as "nondefense discretionary," or NDD funding, which accounts for most domestic activities aside from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and SNAP, at its lowest level since at least Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency.
When Trump signed the "big, beautiful bill" last July, he enacted the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in history. The same law provided enormous tax cuts that disproportionately further enriched the very rich. Taken together, it instituted the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history. The new budget proposal would double down on his legacy of cutting programs that ordinary Americans, and especially those already struggling to make ends meet, rely on.
Budgets are always partially aspirational, but every other president in my lifetime has tried to keep at least most of the discretionary part of their budget requests within reality, specifically to influence the outcome. Trump is not doing that. This is a preview of Bobby Kogan's latest column. Read the full column here. |
