Donald Trump will adopt Heritage Foundations skinny budget: Arts, violence against women funding

[applegrove]

Donald Trump will adopt Heritage Foundation’s “skinny budget”: Arts, violence against women funding to be cut

by Sophia Tesfaye at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2017/01/19/donald-trump-will-adopt-heritage-foundations-skinny-budget-arts-violence-against-women-funding-to-be-cut/

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Donald Trump is relying on a blueprint budget from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the guidance of a former Rand Paul staffer to deliver the most extremely right-wing restructuring of the federal government in decades.

The Trump transition team has been at work for months with career staffers at the White House and throughout the federal bureaucracy to draft a plan to cut $10.5 trillion out of the federal government over 10 years, according to multiple reports.

The president-elect vowed to slash government spending on the campaign trail, promising to add those savings to the massive budget of the Department of Defense. New reporting now outlines just which parts of the federal government will be eliminated by the incoming Trump administration.

So-called “landing teams” have been assigned by the Trump transition team to federal agencies in order to develop a plan to cut some department budgets by as much as 10 percent while slashing 20 percent from the federal workforce. According to the Hill, this effort is being headed by two longtime conservative spending hawks — Russ Vought, who has a reputation for pressuring moderate Republicans while at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and John Gray, a former staffer for libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Rand Paul — both also staffers for Vice President-elect Mike Pence.


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[Eliot Rosewater]

1. GOP is excited about gutting everything that is good for America, especially

Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

I now plan on not having any of them, I now assume they are all gone.

[Kilgore]

2. Wow! Read the article

At the Department of Justice, Trump’s plan would eliminate programs that aim to prevent violence against women, encourage community-oriented policing, and provide legal aid to the indigent. The Heritage Foundation has called those programs a “misuse of federal resources and a distraction from concerns that are truly the province of the federal government.”

Trump’s transition team reportedly also wants to eliminate all funding for the Minority Business Development Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which offers grants to museums, educational institutes, researchers, and authors. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes funding to nearly 1,500 locally owned public radio and TV stations would be privatized, according to the Hill. Three years ago, the NEH and NEA were pushed out of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C. to make way for Trump’s newest hotel.

At the Energy Department, Trump’s plan would eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and Office of Fossil Energy, which develops technologies to reduce carbon emissions. The so-called skinny budget would also drastically reduce funding for the DOJ’s Civil Rights and Environment and Natural Resources divisions.