Trump to Propose Government Reorganization, Targeting Safety Net Programs
Source: New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to propose a reorganization of the federal government as early as Thursday that would shuffle key community development, housing and food programs to new departments, where they could be easier to cut or contain, according to administration officials briefed on the proposal.
The plan, which will most likely face significant opposition in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans, includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the Department of Health and Human Services and probably include the word “welfare” in its title.
Mr. Trump and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, the architect of the plan, have sought to redefine as welfare subsistence benefit programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and housing aid. It is part of a rebranding effort, championed by conservative think tanks and House Republicans, to link them to unpopular direct-cash assistance programs that have traditionally been called welfare.
“They have been using the word welfare because it is pejorative,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “The programs you can call welfare are actually very small in comparison to SNAP, which is an income support necessary to help families, workers and millions of kids.”
At the heart of the plan is an attempt to shift SNAP, which serves more than 42 million poor and working-class Americans, to the new agency from the Agriculture Department. Conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and Koch-related entities, have long sought to de-link food aid from agriculture in hopes of cutting costs. MORE...
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-to-propose-government-reorganization-targeting-safety-net-programs/ar-AAyVpwQ
*Read More about proposed changes to streamline government in the article.*
>Mr. Mulvaney and White House officials have closely guarded details of their plan, sharing them with political appointees but not career staff members at cabinet departments. Administration officials said the blueprint for the plan was a 2017 list of reorganization recommendations produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The group’s wish list includes the elimination of a handful of well-known federal programs, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Export-Import Bank.
- Budget Director Mick Mulvaney
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