Budget Expert, Robert Greenstein Explores Trump’s Heartless Budget in Cleveland City Club Address

Robert Greenstein, the President of the Washington, D.C., Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, addressed the Cleveland City Club last Friday. Greenstein’s subject was President Trump’s proposed budget and what it will mean for real people. Although Greenstein did not specifically address the federal education budget, what he said has profound and tragic implications for the future of public education as well as for health and social services. I urge you to watch the video or listen to the podcast or read Greenstein’s remarks.

President Trump’s budget, explains Greenstein, is a “topic that should be of grave concern to our nation, the state of Ohio, and the city of Cleveland… The Trump budget is different from any that I’ve seen from any President of either party in the 45 years I’ve been working on these issues… First, it is surprisingly unprofessional. President Trump has outlined a very large tax cut that he says will be one of the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history. Yet his budget makes a series of assumptions that few analysts find credible—such as assumptions of soaring economic growth year after year…. The budget also proposes to repeal the federal estate tax but then continues to count the revenue from it as though the tax would remain in place. And second, the budget proposes the most aggressive, Robin-Hood-in-Reverse, budget and tax policies that any modern President has ever proposed.”

Contrary to what we may have been reading in the paper, Greenstein worries that Congress may actually pass a budget like Trump’s proposal: “Now, you may have heard it said that the Trump budget is dead on arrival in Congress. Please don’t believe it. The Trump budget is, in large part, an exaggerated version of the budget plans that the very conservative House Republican majority has advanced every year since 2011, as well as of the last budget plan that the House and Senate jointly adopted, in 2015. Every one of those budgets would have deeply cut programs for Americans of limited means, deeply cut non-defense discretionary programs, shifted costs to states and localities, and provided substantial tax cuts for those at the top. None of those budgets made their way into law because Barack Obama was president. But now, the White House, House, and Senate are controlled by the same party, and they all have the same general idea about budget cuts and tax cuts.”

The first way Greenstein’s remarks speak to the future of our nation’s public schools is his discussion of the Robin-Hood-In-Reverse budget priorities that will take from the poor and near-poor and reward the rich through massive tax cuts. It has been well established that children’s school achievement is deeply affected by family and neighborhood poverty. Here is a reminder of that fact in a letter sent last year by the Vermont State Board of Education to then-Secretary of Education John King: “Fundamentally, if we are to close the achievement gap, it is imperative that we substantively address the underlying economic and social disparities that characterize our nation, our communities and our schools.  With two-thirds of the score variance attributable to outside of school factors, test score gaps measure the health of our society more than the quality of our schools.”  This blog has explored the effects of poverty on school achievement; see, for example, here, here, and here.

So what does Greenstein tell us about how the President’s proposed budget will affect poor families and children? The budget “proposes remarkably large tax cuts for those at the top and remarkably severe cuts in social programs for those who face hard times—cuts in one program after another for working-poor families, (and) disadvantaged children… which would push millions of Americans either into poverty or deeper into it. The budget is especially harsh on people who live paycheck to paycheck or otherwise struggle to get by…. The budget embraces the House-passed bill to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cause 23 million more American to become uninsured… The budget also cuts nearly $200 billion over ten years from the food stamp program, both by cutting the program directly and by forcing states to pay about one-quarter of food stamp benefit costs…. (T)he Trump budget proposes to end the national food stamp benefit standards, which President Nixon and Congress established on a bipartisan basis after researchers in the late 1960s found rates of child malnutrition and nutrition-related diseases in parts of our country that were akin to the rates in some third-world countries. The Trump budget would turn back the clock.”

Greenstein continues: “In other areas, the budget would turn the clock back even further, to decades well before the 1960s. There’s a part of the federal budget known as non-defense-discretionary programs. This includes most of the federal spending for education, job training, scientific research, and transportation—important building blocks for a healthy economy in the future. It also includes funds for environmental protection, food safety, national parks, veterans’ health care, and a number of important programs to help low-and modest-income families, like low-income housing assistance, Head Start, and child care. This part of the budget has already been squeezed heavily in recent years. But the Trump budget would cut it so much more deeply that by 2017, total non-defense discretionary spending would be at its lowest level, as a share of the economy, since Herbert Hoover was president.”

In his remarks to the Cleveland City Club, Greenstein also addresses a second way that the new budget, if passed, will threaten public education. Again, the specific topic of public education is not a focus, but the implications are clear as Greenstein explains how the new budget, if passed, will dump the responsibility for paying for an enormous burden of previously federally funded programs onto states and localities. As readers of this blog are surely aware, the states take care of roughly half of education funding, with most of the rest paid for by local school districts. The federal government itself pays less than ten percent of K-12 education. Because education is the biggest line in many state budgets, it is among the only places (apart from or on top of massive state tax increases) where significant money could be found to pay for huge added costs for Medicaid and other added health care costs, food stamps, TANF, housing assistance and all the rest. And according to Greenstein, this federal budget bill is designed to demand that, as time passes, states must cover more and more of the costs previously paid for by the federal government.

For his Cleveland audience, Greenstein explains how shifting the cost of social and health programming would affect Ohio alone: “By the way, one-third of federal non-defense discretionary spending is for grants to state and local governments to help them deliver important services. The Trump budget cuts would hit Ohio and Cleveland hard. As just one of many examples, in 2018 alone, Ohio would lose $137 million in Community Development Block Grant funding….” “Ohio’s Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which insures 700,000 people, would end.  On top of that, the (budget) bill cuts federal funding for Ohio’s entire Medicaid program, with the cuts growing larger with each passing year; this would place the state’s 3 million Medicaid enrollees, and Ohio’s health care providers, at risk.” The proposed shift of food stamp costs to Ohio’s budget would be $4 billion over ten years.

Just a week ago, Greenstein’s colleagues at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Iris Lav and Michael Leachman, published a major report, The Trump Budget’s Massive Cuts to State and Local Services and Programs, which details what cuts to state and local governments will mean for the people who lose services unless states can find a way to compensate for federal cuts.

First there are entitlement programs (and this report calls food stamps by the acronym for its current name, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. SNAP): “Entitlement (or mandatory) programs are ongoing; they continue as they are unless policymakers change them. The Trump budget would significantly change three entitlements—Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF—and eliminate a fourth, the Social Services Block Grant.”

Then there are programs that are funded each year when Congress appropriates the money for specific budget lines—the part of the budget called Non-Defense Discretionary Spending: “The total cut to discretionary grants for states and localities would amount to $28 billion in 2018 and grow to about $82 billion a year by 2027.”  Programs eliminated are Low Income Energy Assistance; HOME Investment Partnerships, Community Development Block Grant and Choice Neighborhoods; the Community Services Block Grant; and two education programs—the 21st Century Community Learning Center after-school programs, and Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants (30 percent of these funds are used for class-size reduction and the rest for teacher professional development).

Make no mistake.  Eliminating  all these programs and reducing the federal budget for a host of others will hurt vulnerable families and children. And the federal cuts, even to programs that are not directly related to public schools, will inevitably further reduce state expenditures on public education when states struggle try to rearrange the budget to help desperate people who need health and social services. Here are Lav and Leachman in last week’s report: “Some may argue that states could pay for and continue these programs, rather than have people suffer the consequences of losing assistance and opportunities. The President’s March budget blueprint (the earlier Skinny Budget) repeatedly comments that various programs should be transferred to the states, with no mention of additional resources to support the transfer. The reality, however, is that states lack the wherewithal to replace the magnitude of funds they would lose under the budget. States operate under balanced budget requirements, and most states are already struggling to balance their current budgets, even before any federal cost shifts. Recent state revenue growth has been weaker than expected, leaving 28 states with budget shortfalls this fiscal year… Most of these states have responded by cutting services, using reserves, and taking other steps to balance their budgets…. More than half the states lack the revenue needed to maintain services at existing levels in 2018.”

Robert Greenstein’s speech to the Cleveland City Club is a clear and easy way to become better informed about the outrageous heartlessness of the budget Trump and Congress are considering.  I urge you to watch the video or listen to the podcast or read Greenstein’s remarks.  Then be in touch with your U.S. Senators.