When the budget-cutter begins wielding his axe, every tiny piece of our $4 trillion federal budget becomes vital to someone’s survival. Close any military base or discontinue any weapons system, and the Russians will be coming over the hill within a month. Cut any program that claims to do just about anything to alleviate poverty, and people will be dying in the streets by the end of the week.
This certainly became the case when President Trump’s “skinny budget” was first made public, containing program eliminations and real-dollar cuts to many components of the discretionary budget. But years of such pleading should make you skeptical, even before you hear the details.
A piece typical of this genre appeared in The New Republic on April 17 about the Appalachian Regional Commission, which faces cuts or possibly even elimination. And like many others, this piece contains the classic Trump-era twist: The beneficiaries of government programs seem to be voting against own self-interest. Are people in Appalachia failing to show sufficient gratitude for what Democrats have done for them? Or did they think (I suppose it would be hard to blame them) that the Republicans they now vote for overwhelmingly every two years aren’t serious when they talk about limited government? Or have Democrats failed to make clear that they’re the ones bringing the manna from heaven, and the Republicans are trying to send them back to bondage in the land of Egypt?
There’s another possible explanation that perhaps eludes people: Some of these programs just aren’t as big a deal as liberal journalists are trying to make them seem. Who is more likely to think that a $120 million to $150 million government program is vital — a journalist in Washington who writes about government programs, or one of the 20 million or so people living in the region throughout which that modest sum — about six dollars per person — will be spread out by ARC if it gets its full budget request this year?
As the piece notes, Republicans have been talking about scrapping ARC since Reagan tried to do it unsuccessfully in 1981. Appalachia’s politics have probably not changed since then in a way that suggests any appreciation for the (very real) federal help that state and local governments in Appalachia receive. But whether or not people are sufficiently grateful, the real issue in every case should be whether a specific program should continue. And it’s always suspicious when those constructing the case for a program like ARC blow past the entire rationale for getting rid of it.
Among other things, ARC provides very modest, usually six-figure but sometimes seven-figure grants (some recent examples here) that help fund small but worthy local infrastructure projects. In a context where Congress is discussing a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, it’s actually quite reasonable to ask whether there might be a better use for that tiny amount of money, or a better way for making such grants. Such small sums hearken back to the old congressional earmarks that some members of Congress now want to bring back — usually nickel-and-dime funding that merits a press release but goes unnoticed by the public. (Voters didn’t exactly storm town halls when earmarks were scrapped in 2011.)
It would be wrong merely to hold ARC’s small size alone against it — what if it does a lot of good with very little money? As the article puts it, the program has “supplied water and sewer services to more than 800,000 households, built over 2,000 miles of road, and created hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
Well, okay — it didn’t quite fund all of that. The way the commission itself puts it in its own literature is that it “helped” fund it. And in political speak, that’s a loaded phrase that should make you ask: Is this program really essential, or is it just attached to enough worthy causes that it will now be inordinately hard to eliminate? Like the Community Development Block Grants that contribute a small amount of the funding for some localities’ Meals-on-Wheels programs, some programs become politically sensitive not on their own merits or because anyone would miss them, but by dint of their marginal involvement in something that people like.
It’s entirely possible that ARC is not like all those other government programs that fit this description. But nowadays, the taxpayer cannot afford to make that assumption based on anecdotes from a program’s successes. It’s almost as difficult to justify as the assumption that West Virginia will vote for Democrats again if only those people there would understand how much they owe us.
