Slash slash slash
I guess the principle of Trumpism and most of the contemporary Republican party in the US is: destroy everything good. Trump’s budget slashes not only Medicaid and anti-poverty programs, but also scientific and medical research. Booya.
President Trump’s 2018 budget request, delivered to Congress on Tuesday with the title “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” has roiled the medical and science community with a call for massive cuts in spending on scientific research, medical research, disease prevention programs and health insurance for children of the working poor.
The National Cancer Institute would be hit with a $1 billion cut compared to its 2017 budget. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute would see a $575 million cut, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would see a reduction of $838 million. The administration would cut the overall National Institutes of Health budget from $31.8 billion to $26 billion.
It’s especially ironic that that’s dubbed “A New Foundation for American Greatness” when scientific and medical research constitute one of our major claims to greatness.
The proposed cuts to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drew an unusually sharp rebuke from former CDC director Tom Frieden, who went on Twitter to describe the administration’s CDC request as “unsafe at any level of enactment. Would increase illness, death, risks to Americans, and health care costs.”
In a separate tweet, Frieden listed what he sees as the dire ramifications of the Trump proposal, saying, for starters, that it “Devastates programs that protect Americans from cancer, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and other deadly and expensive conditions.”
Steven Houser, president of the American Heart Association, called Trump’s budget “devastating” and “unconscionable.” He urged Congress to boost funding for NIH by $2 billion rather than cut it by nearly $6 billion.
Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the Trump budget is short-sighted, particularly in assuming that economic growth won’t be hampered by cuts in government-funded research.
Seriously. Did no one tell him that the research makes possible a lot of thriving industries? Does Trump think flogging real estate is the only profit-making enterprise there is?
Slashing programs that normally have enjoyed bipartisan support is part of the Trump administration’s effort to trim trillions of dollars in spending over the next decade while at the same time paying for tax cuts and increases in military spending.
Because that’s Trump. Money for rich people and weapons good, everything else bad and for losers.
“A New Foundation for American Greatness”
Someone seriously thinks that’s a good name? I think we’ve now got beyond newspeak, and are in the territory of hastily coined titles of the sort one might read in a piece of bludgeoning irony.
We now have the proposed budget for energy. Short version – big cuts in everything except administration and nuclear weapons. During the campaign Trump talked largely about “clean coal”, which to mean anything must involve carbon capture and carbon storage. Research in both areas is cut by more than 80%. So we’ll get the coal, but it won’t be clean. Surprise!
https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/05/f34/FY2018BudgetStatisticalTablebyAppropriation.pdf
The one bright spot is that there are a number of lawmakers who are saying no way. John Cornyn says this budget won’t happen. Of course, the Republicans in Congress are capable of doing a lot of damage even without Trump – and if he vetoes the budget because he didn’t get what he wants, are we going to face a massive government shut down?
Sometimes I think that might be a good thing. If we just shut down everything the government does for a couple of days, people might suddenly realize, hey, I need that stuff. I need those highways and cleaning up my wastewater and….on it goes (because state and local governments would have trouble meeting their obligations if the Feds shut down for too long). The only problem is, that would lead to a lot of people getting hurt, and they are the ones who need it the most, the ones who couldn’t manage to get through a few days of inconvenience, because they rely so much on the massive infrastructure that supports our lives and our society.