Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose pro-workers rights and anti-trade presidential campaign message had crossover appeal to President Trump’s supporters, has labeled the president’s “America First” budget “morally obscene.”
“President Trump’s budget is morally obscene and bad economic policy,” the Vermont independent said in a statement Thursday. “It will cause devastating pain to the very people Trump promised to help during the campaign.”
New details of the president’s budget, released Thursday, show $54 billion in cuts to federal agencies to pay for a boost in defense spending. The Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department face some of the biggest spending reductions. Trump wants to cut both agencies’ budgets by roughly one-third.
The budget also slashes the Department of Labor spending by 20.7 percent, or $2.5 billion in spending over the next year, with cuts to some job training programs.
Sanders took exception to the cuts to domestic programs made to fund defense increases. He called the dramatic shift in the nation’s spending priorities “exactly opposite of where we should be heading as a nation.”
“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when 43 million Americans are living in poverty and half of older Americans have no retirement savings, we should not slash programs that senior citizens, children and working people rely on in order to provide a massive increase in spending to the military industrial complex,” he said.
The Trump budget is only a blueprint with no enforcement mechanism. It serves to lay out his wish list of spending priorities, but only Congress has the power to determine government spending levels and choose which agencies’ budgets will be cut and which will be increased.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., late last month said that he did not support deep cuts to the State Department.
