While Donald Trump received a tepid response from the G.O.P. at first, Republican lawmakers quickly warmed to the president-elect in the wake of his unexpected election, eager to work with the incoming administration to bring their deferred dreams of cutting taxes and gutting government services to fruition. Trump himself has demonstrated little interest in fiscal responsibility, vowing to increase military spending, preserve Medicare and Social Security, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new infrastructure projects (“The conservatives are going to go crazy,” Stephen Bannon predicted in an interview last year, elucidating his messianic plan to “rebuild everything.”) Still, Trump’s muscular, nationalist-populist vision for the federal government doesn’t include such niceties as foreign aid to Africa or the National Endowment for the Arts, giving even the wariest of fiscal conservatives their best chance in decades to purge the federal budget of trillions of dollars in spending on programs and projects favored by Democrats.
Ahead of his presidential inauguration on Friday, Trump transition team members have been meeting with career White House staffers to unveil a proposal to radically remake the federal bureaucracy, The Hill reports. The plan, presented by Trump team members Russ Vought and John Gray to the federal budget office, would curtail government spending by a $10.5 trillion over the next decade.
To call the potential cuts “dramatic” is an understatement. According to The Hill, the proposal would shutter Justice Department programs that seek to prevent violence against women, promote community-oriented policing and provide legal aid. It would also slash funding for the Civil Rights and the Environment and Natural Resources division under the D.O.J. umbrella. Three top State Department initiatives focused on climate change, in addition to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and Office of Fossil Energy, are headed for the chopping block under the plan. The Minority Business Development Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities are also up for elimination, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized. It is unclear if the plan includes cuts to Social Security and Medicaid, which Trump and his team have repeatedly pledged to protect.
The proposal aligns closely with a budget plan drafted last year by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, where both Vought and Gray previously worked. Many of the cuts in the Trump plan were also included in a budget proposal pushed by the Republican Study Committee (R.S.C.) caucus last year, which would have decreased federal spending over the next 10 years by $8.6 trillion but was not voted on by the House. Still, such draconian budgets are rarely popular, even among many Republicans. As New York magazine notes, a similar budget proposal was shot down in 2015 by a Republican-controlled House by a vote of 132 to 294.
Among those who did back the bill, however, was Mick Mulvaney. As Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the South Carolina congressman’s support could prove crucial. “Mulvaney didn’t take this OMB position to just mind the store,” a former congressional aide told The Hill. “He wants to make significant, fundamental changes to the structure of the president’s budget, and I expect him to do that with Vought and Gray putting the meat on the bones,” the source added.
But the problem with “significant, fundamental changes” is that they generally require widespread support. Despite Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell’s eagerness to shrink the size of the federal government, Democrats and moderate Republicans are likely to oppose a number of the deep cuts proposed—especially when they affect jobs in their own districts. Trump himself remains a wild card, too. The unpredictable 45th president has yet to offer public comment on the specifics of such a budget, and a line item review via Twitter remains, as always, a possibility.
