On March 15, President Donald Trump released his budget blueprint for the upcoming year — and it was anything but pretty.
According to Reuters, in Trump’s first budget outline, he calls for a security-heavy realignment of federal spending as he plans to increase military spending by 10 percent over the next year and beef up funding to help with deporting more undocumented immigrants with a proposed wall on the border of Mexico.
According to NPR, agencies to undergo the biggest proposed cuts are the EPA, losing 31 percent, the State Department losing 29 percent along with the Food and Agriculture Department losing 21 percent in total funding.
On the flip side, agencies to undergo the biggest increases are the Veterans Affairs Department, gaining six percent, the Homeland Security Department, gaining seven percent and the Defense Department gaining 10 percent.
This increase in military funding is completely unnecessary and absurd because the military already has more federal funding compared to nearly every other department.
We aren’t under any immediate threat. We’re safe. We aren’t facing air-strikes like Syria, we aren’t a part of a dictatorship like North Korea and we already have the most expansive military in the world.
It makes no sense and there’s no reason for funding the military any more than we already are, which is already more than it needs to be.
According to the National Priorities Project, in 2015 congress allocated $598.49 billion in discretionary spending to the military alone.
According to the International Monetary Fund, this is more than the gross domestic products of New Zealand, Greece, Puerto Rico, Ethiopia, Bulgaria and Bhutan—combined.
Meanwhile, according to the National Priorities Project, the discretionary spending allocated to energy and environment as of 2015 is a mere $39.14 billion—more than 15 times less than what the military gets.
Likewise, congress budgeted veteran’s benefits $160.63 billion of the total federal spending in 2015, more than the combined federal spending of both the energy and environment department and the education department.
The unnecessary raises and cuts to the specified departments are contradictory to Trump’s plan to reconstruct the GOP as the “workers party,” which is slowly crumbling as most of the policies he’s trying to enact only seem to devastate the working class citizens who put him in power.
According to Dallas News, some of the largest proposed cuts in the White House plan would eliminate the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program that funds organizations like Meals on Wheels, the national nonprofit that provides food for the homebound elderly and disabled.
This grant program helps to provide funds to cities for things such as affordable housing and economic opportunities to people with little to no income.
Without that money, 32,000 meals would be eliminated a year, according to Dallas News, literally taking food from the mouths of the people he claimed to be supporting. Trump’s plan is not only unsound, but it’s wildly irresponsible.
It supports the few departments that are already receiving more funding than the others and it cuts funding from those that need it now more than ever.
Is this really the best way to make America great again?
