Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Trump's FY2020
Budget Request Bloats Militarized Spending—and Slashes Actual Human Needs
Lindsay
Koshgarian, Ashik Siddique
March
11, 2019
National
Priorites Project
At long last,
President Trump released his third presidential budget request today, after
a month-long delay due to the government shutdown. And it’s a doozy.
President Trump’s
priorities for FY 2020 go even further than last year’s request in
bloating the already enormous military budget, requesting $750 billion for the
military —an increase of 5 percent, or $34 billion, from the 2019 enacted
budget.
That would put 57
percent of the $1.3 trillion discretionary budget into the Pentagon and nuclear
weapons. Meanwhile, total funding for all other agencies, from the Department
of Education to Veterans Affairs and NASA, is only $543 billion, down from $597
billion budgeted in 2019 - a nine percent decrease.
The budget
pretends to be fiscally responsible, but it relies to an unprecedented degree
on one of the biggest budget gimmicks of the 21st century, a Pentagon slush
fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations. This account was first
established to pay for wars in 2001, but has become a genie in a bottle for the
fulfillment of any Pentagon wish that doesn’t fit in the regular budget.
Administrations can claim to keep Pentagon spending under control, and stuff
the extra into the slush fund. The Trump budget takes full advantage, more than
doubling funding for this Pentagon slush fund, to $165 billion, up from $81
billion enacted last year.
An additional $9
billion in the military budget is listed under “emergency requirements,” which
may provide funds to build the border wall that President Trump is
showing no signs of dropping as a political football. Reports from
administration sources indicate that the president’s budget includes $8.6
billion to fund construction of a border wall, in addition to $3.6 billion
to repay military construction funds he has attempted to seize to construct a
wall.
The top-line
budget numbers released today in the president’s “A Budget for a Better
America” document provide a broad outline of the President’s priorities — more
specific numbers are expected to be released next week.
But the document
lays out some of the incredibly out-of-touch, militaristic items flagged
for national security funding increases, like the “United States
Space Force (USSF)” proposed as a sixth branch of the Armed Forces. And the
budget touts the ramp-up of nuclear funds to begin a planned $1
trillion-plus renewed commitment to U.S. nuclear weapons capacity. The National
Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the Dept. of Energy gets an 8.9
percent boost to $16.5 billion for even more nuclear weapons proliferation.
On border
security, the FY 2020 budget proposes to increase funding for Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) to $18.2 billion, and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) to $8.8 billion — up 19 percent from FY 2019.
While pumping up
all these facets of the militarized budget, Trump’s budget is proposing a
23.3 percent cut to the State Department, America’s major means of preventing
military conflict through diplomacy, bringing it down to $42.8 billion.
This is all while
proposing massive cuts to agencies that actually meet human needs, like the
Department of Education (down 12 percent to $62 billion), Housing and Urban
Development (down 16.4 percent to $44.1 billion), Department of Transportation
(down 21.5 percent to $21.4 billion), and the Department of Labor (down 9.7
percent to $10.9 billion).
Among the hardest
hit are the Environmental Protection Agency, brought down 31 percent to $6.1
billion, and the non-nuke portion of the Department of Energy, down 25.4
percent to $15.2 billion. So much for dealing with the actual existential
threat of climate change!
Of course,
presidential budgets rarely come to pass. But President Trump’s intentions are
clear, and if his recent willingness to shut down the federal government
is any indication, there are plenty of fights ahead.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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