The 62 agencies and programs Trump wants to eliminate
Web Publication: USA Today, by Gregory Korte
Slash & Burn?
Yesterday, USA Today published a list of the cuts that Trump is including in his budget. USA Today is to be commended for this sort of straight journalism. The list is somewhat concise and organized. The title is somewhat misleading though. If you read through their own detail, you will notice that many of the programs would be shifted to states or that they’re duplicated efforts by other agencies. However; I saw other headlines far more sensationalized, bluntly implicating that Trump wants to CUT SCIENCE, CUT EDUCATION, CUT CHILDREN. That’s just irresponsible.
The word ‘eliminate’ leads the reader to believe that Trump wants targeted initiatives to vanish in a puff of smoke, leaving millions without crucial services. If you choose to read the detail yourself, and it is fairly brief, and if you put on your intelligent and impartial hat, you’ll probably agree that at least, many of the items are truly bureaucratic excess. You’ll observe that most of the programs and services will live on in some other iteration, in another agency, or at the state level.
In fact, using the word ‘cuts’, is probably a bad move on the part of the administration. ‘Restructuring’ would be more accurate. If you can set aside your own pet cause for a moment, please admit that we’ve needed something on this scale for some time. Unless you’re a die-hard statist, a-la Lenin, you have to appreciate that someone is attempting to lessen the long-term impact on your own purse. If you had to choose between a cut in your social security payment twenty years from now or keeping a floor of faceless bureaucrats employed now, what would you choose?
Everyone has their pet projects. The National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting seem to be the poster children for egregious heinous budget cuts. I love art and public radio as much as anyone. It doesn’t matter that the government currently funds only a tiny percentage of arts and non-commercial broadcasting. The press is treating this somewhat on the scale of Mao’s cultural purge. At some point you just have to get real. The bulk of funds currently come from [a-ha! ‘evil’!] wealthy individuals and corporations. They’ll be glad to pay just a little more to continue to see fine art and take in their favorite fine art radio and TV. That’s a big chunk of the audience after-all. If these endeavors truly need a Washington DC office to coordinate those efforts, its time for elite patrons bemoaning the cuts, to either put up or shut up. I hope to see the NEA and the CPB continue, only now, as a quasi government agency using 100% private money. Who knows, maybe they’ll even grow!
Just think for a moment that someone benefitting from cultural shifts, like Mark Zuckerberg can gain or lose an amount in one day, far greater than the annual budget for one of these agencies. Back in the day, the Carnegies, Mellons, Morgans, and Duponts of the world stepped up to leave a cultural legacy to the world. Today, in living donors, we have the Gates Foundation, but we also have many other equally endowed individuals that have yet to step up on that scale. This restructuring is overdue.