President Trump released what is called a “skinny budget.” It may contain far less information then the skinny budgets released by the five previous administrations, but its aim is crystal clear: more money for militarism, less money for pretty much everything else.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains:
The Trump budget includes only estimates for fiscal 2018 and only for its proposed changes to discretionary programs (those funded through the annual appropriations process) — even though discretionary programs make up less than one-third of the federal budget. The Trump budget omits any figures on entitlement or mandatory spending (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal retirement, or SNAP), interest payments, revenues, or deficits.
The following table shows the Trump administration’s proposed changes in discretionary program spending for fiscal year 2018 (which begins in October 2017).
The budget calls for a continuation of Obama administration cuts in overall discretionary spending—a 1.2 percent decline in real dollars for fiscal year 2018. The figure below highlights the trend. 
In many cases, the proposed cuts to nonmilitary programs appear designed to dismantle key government agencies and programs. A few examples:
The Environmental Protection Agency would take the biggest hit, with a proposed 31 percent cut to its budget. This would give the agency its smallest budget since it was formed in 1970. Angela Chen and Alessandra Potenza, writing in the Verge, highlight what is at stake:
Through legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, the EPA has ensured that Americans live in a relatively healthy environment. Thanks to the EPA’s work, from 1970 to 2015, national emissions of pollutants like lead, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide have declined by an average of 70 percent. These and more changes meant 160,000 people in the US didn’t die prematurely due to air pollution in 2010 alone. Since the 1980s, the EPA has also worked with local authorities to clean up some of the most polluted sites in the US, from landfills that caught fire to radioactive waste housed close to residential areas.
The proposed Department of Health and Human Services budget would, in real terms, be rolled back 18 years, to its 2000 spending level. The Department, as Chen and Potenza describe:
oversees several major agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the Office for Civil Rights. . . .These agencies make sure our drugs are safe, provide funding for medical research, lead the way during public health outbreaks such as the ebola scare, and provide services to those struggling with drug addiction. . . .Half of the most transformative drugs of the last 25 years were made possible because of publicly funded research, according to a 2015 study.
The proposed budget for the Education Department would be its lowest in 17 years.
The discretionary part of the Department of Agriculture budget would be slashed to its lowest level since the 1970s.
Transportation would have its lowest real budget in 18 years.
Labor’s budget would be rolled back to levels last seen in the 1970s.
And then there is Defense and Homeland Security, both of which enjoy substantial real increases. This despite the fact that the Defense Department cannot even account for how it spends its money. As Reuters reports:
The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.
The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June [2016] report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.
As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”
Disclosure of the Army’s manipulation of numbers is the latest example of the severe accounting problems plaguing the Defense Department for decades.
The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress’ annual budget – spends the public’s money.
The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.
None of this matters, of course, to those powerful political and economic forces that are determined to push the militarization of the country.
Whether this skinny budget turns out to be a trial balloon, a way for the Trump administration to gauge how far it can go, followed by modest adjustments if it meets strong resistance, remains to be seen. Regardless, it is critical that we begin now to engage in serious coalition building involving those communities that rely on public services and the public sector workers, at all levels of government, that deliver those services, to shape and advance a powerful and positive vision of the public sector we want and need. Otherwise, we face a future of ever worsening tradeoffs, with profit-driven corporations steadily moving into the vacuum created by cuts in public programs to increase their control over all facets of our lives.
Reports from the Economic Front 