What do Medicare, Muppets and Bob Dylan have in common? Trump budget cuts, reports say
President Donald Trump’s federal budget proposal is expected to be released Monday, and it includes steep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and foreign aid programs, according to multiple reports.
First reported by The Wall Street Journal, Trump’s budget proposal for 2021 totals $4.8 trillion, with increases in military spending, including the new Space Force, and $2 billion for a wall along the southern border with Mexico.
The budget cuts in the president’s proposal reduces funding for foreign aid by 21%, The Journal reports, and the Environmental Protection Agency by more than a quarter.
Those $11.7 billion in cuts to foreign aid, The New York Post reports, include $10,000 for a Muppet Retrospective in New Zealand along with HIV programs and federal student exchange.
An unnamed official told The Post: “The Bob Dylan statue in Mozambique, the cricket league in Afghanistan, these are things that we just think are wasteful, and they’re largely funded out of economic development.”
The president’s budget proposal, The New York Times reports, “is generally viewed as a political messaging document.” Congress controls the power of the purse to set federal spending.
The budget does show Trump’s political priorities ahead of the November election and point to what he hopes to accomplish if elected for a second term.
Responding to reports about the president’s budget proposal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “The budget is a statement of values and once again the President is showing just how little he values the good health, financial security and well-being of hard-working American families.”
“Less than a week after promising to protect families’ health care in his State of the Union address, the President is now brazenly inflicting savage multi-billion-dollar cuts to Medicare and Medicaid – at the same time that he is fighting in federal court to destroy protections for people with pre-existing conditions and dismantle every other protection and benefit of the Affordable Care Act,” Pelosi said in a statement.
In a tweet after the first reports of the budget proposal began coming out, Trump said, “We will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget. Only the Democrats will destroy them by destroying our Country’s greatest ever Economy!“
According to The Wall Street Journal, the budget proposal aims to cut mandatory spending by $2 trillion over the next decade. The cuts, the newspaper reports, include “$130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps—and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to disability benefits.”
