Monthly Archives: May 2017

When the White House officially unveiled its 2018 budget Tuesday, President Donald Trump's budget director took pains to insist that the blueprint represents campaign promises kept.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said that the president is making good on his vow to save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, among other things, and said that they are not kicking anyone off who needs the programs.

Yet deep cuts to many aspects of the American safety net indicate otherwise.

Here's where the president's proposal breaks his promises and at times his own self-proposed contract to voters.

Broken Promise #1: Trump vowed not to cut Medicaid

Trump's budget would cut Medicaid by a lot, despite the president telling the Daily Signal days before launching his White House bid, "I'm not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid."

The administration proposes reducing spending on Medicaid programs by more than $600 billion over the next decade, a massive cut that appears to go on top of $839 billion in Medicaid cuts included in the House health care bill Trump is supporting.

Mulvaney insists that the proposed reduction in spending isn't a cut it's simply growing less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the needs of the program to be.

"There are no Medicaid cuts in terms of what normal human beings would call cuts, we are not spending less money than we did the year before," Mulvaney said.

Broken Promise #2: Trump said he wouldn't cut Social Security

Trump's budget proposes slashing the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), a $31.4 billion change to the program that pays monthly benefits to over 10 million disabled individuals under the retirement age.

Mulvaney argued that SSDI isn't "what most people would consider to be Social Security" and said he would "hope" less people receive the program once they remove individuals who "should not" be getting it. It's unclear how the administration determined there is that much fraud in the system.

Broken Promise #3: Trump said he'd fully fund the border wall

The president promised to fully fund a border wall, with plans to make Mexico pay for it later, in his "Contract With the American Voter." The president's budget would allocate $2.6 billion for planning, designing, and constructing the border wall and its surrounding securities, but Republican leaders estimate the wall could cost as much as $15 billion.

"While we did not get as much money as we wanted for 2017 omnibus we did get a lot," Mulvaney said. "We are going to continue to press on."

Broken Promise #4: Trump promised to cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities

This is another contract promise. Trump's administration has tried to restrict funding to so-called "sanctuary" cities jurisdiction that don't enforce federal immigration priorities and cooperate fully with federal authorities but their efforts were halted by the courts.

This budget doesn't include any kind of limit on federal funding, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions narrowed the scope of Trump's executive order on the issue in a memo Monday.

Broken Promise #5: Trump said he would increase funding for treatment of PTSD

Trump's budget would increase funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs, but the budget proposal doesn't appear to focus money on PTSD or mental health issues.

It would, however, slash $3.2 billion from the "individual unemployability" benefit, which the budget says will be "modernized." The program allows the VA to more fully compensate disabled veterans, including those with PTSD, whose disability renders them unemployable.

Broken Promise #6: Trump told police union leaders he'd find more funding for training

Trump promised resources for training in his voter contract, as well. This budget aims to increase funding for more border agents and immigration judges, increased immigrant detentions, and fighting the opioid crisis, but it does not earmark additional funds for training police.

Broken Promise #7: Trump promised to bring down the debt "fairly quickly"

Barring the kind of hyperbolic growth Trump has promised and economists have disputed, Trump's budget would do little to combat the national debt. Rather, it would potentially increase it.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

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Donald Trump's Budget Breaks These 7 Campaign Promises - NBCNews.com

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Donald Trump Discovers Muslims - New York Times

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Manchester, Donald Trump, Roger Moore: Your Morning Briefing - New York Times

Donald Trumps approval rating has fallen by 4 points in the wake of several weeks of controversial developments, including his decision to oust FBI chief James Comey.

The Harvard-Harris poll, provided exclusively to The Hill, was taken May 17-20 and shows the presidents approval rating has dropped to 45 percentfrom the 49 percentin the same survey taken in March.

In particular, respondents to the surveywhich questioned 2,006 registered voters rather than people sampled from the general populationdisapproved of Trumps decision to fire Comey, as well as how he went about ousting the former bureau chief.

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The poll, taken at the height of the Comey frenzy, shows a weakening hand, as would be expected, Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard-Harris survey, told The Hill.

President Donald Trump in the House of Representatives on February 28 and then-FBI Director James Comey in Washington on July 7, 2016. Jim Lo Scalzo/Gary Cameron/Reuters

He is holding on to 90 percent of his voters, and his ratings are still above approval ratings for both the Democratic and Republican parties, Penn said.

But Comey has proved to be no more popular than Trump; in fact,the majority of people polled (60 percent) disapproved of Comeys performance as head of the FBI.

Additionally, 70 percentof people disliked the way in which Comey handled the investigation into Hillary Clintons use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Penn said,The polling on Comey shows that President Trump is more in trouble for the way he fired Comey rather than for removing him.

Another bump in the road for Trump came after The Washington Postrevealed that heshared highly classified information about a plot by the Islamic State group (ISIS), which was obtained through an intelligence-sharing partnership, with Russian officials in the Oval Office.

The majority of voters (52 percent across both parties and 56 percentof independents) surveyed said they did not think it was appropriate for the president to reveal such highly classified information to Russia. Thispossibly affected Trumps popularity rating as well.

Although the poll does show a drop in approval for Trump, it gives higher figures than many other approval-rating polls, possibly because the questions went tovoters rather than members of the general public.

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Donald Trump's Popularity Drops 4 Points in Wake of Comey Firing - Newsweek

(WASHINGTON) Education advocates say President Donald Trump's budget contradicts his campaign pledge to make college more affordable with its proposed elimination of subsidized student loans and cuts in other programs that help students pay tuition.

The 2018 budget, unveiled Tuesday, slashes funding for the Education Department by 13.5 percent.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement that it "reflects a series of tough choices we have had to make when assessing the best use of taxpayer money. It ensures funding for programs with proven results for students while taking a hard look at programs that sound nice but simply haven't yielded the desired outcomes."

But critics said it contradicts President Donald Trump's campaign promises to make college more affordable at a time when student debt is ballooning.

"Donald Trump ran as a populist, but he is a governing as an elitist and this budget is a clear indication of that," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination last year, Trump had said, "We're going to work with all of our students who are drowning in debt to take the pressure off these people just starting out in their adult lives. Tremendous problem."

His first budget seeks to save over $1 billion by eliminating subsidized student loans. For undergraduate students who qualify, the government pays the interest while they remain in college. Students can borrow up to $23,000 during their four years in college. The current interest rate is 3.76 percent.

An additional $859 million would be saved by ending student debt forgiveness for those who enter public service. The program was launched in 2007 with the idea to motivate university graduates to take government and teaching jobs in remote rural areas. Under the program, the remainder of a student's debt is forgiven after he or she makes 120 qualifying payments, or typically after 10 years.

Natalia Abrams, executive director of Student Debt Crisis, an advocacy group, said that over 550,000 borrowers are currently enrolled in the debt forgiveness program. The Education Department said those already in the program will not be affected by the change.

"We need to make it easier for people to go to and pay for college, this budget does the exact opposite," Abrams said.

The budget also proposes to nearly halve the federal work-study program to $500 million. The program provides funding to colleges and universities to create jobs for students, which help them pay tuition.

It maintains funding for Pell grants and makes them available year-round.

Former Education Secretary John King called Trump's budget "an assault on the American dream" and said it will make it harder for students to attend and finish college. "They are harming the long-term future not just of students but also of the country," he told The Associated Press.

Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president the National Education Association, describes the document "a wrecking ball of a budget" and that they would work to defeat it.

For elementary and secondary education, the budget seeks to expand charter and voucher-type programs for private schools around the country. It calls for an additional $1 billion in funds to encourage school districts to advance choice options, $250 million in scholarships to low-income families to attend private schools and $167 million to start or expand charter schools. However, the budget stops short of launching a sweeping $20 billion school choice project that Trump talked about on the campaign trail.

The American Federation of Children, a school choice advocacy group, which DeVos used to head, praised the increase in school choice funding.

"We're pleased to see the administration put funding muscle behind their pledge to facilitate an expansion of school choice options across the country," the group said in a statement

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Donald Trump's 2018 Budget Slashes Education Department Funding by 13.5% - TIME

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Manchester, Donald Trump, Uber: Your Tuesday Briefing - New York Times