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19 federal agencies eliminated in proposed Trump budget

This article provides a clear and detailed list of the nineteen federal agencies that the Trump administration proposes to eliminate in the budget blueprint it issued last month.

The total budget for all these agencies is only $3 billion, so the cuts are only a mere drop in the bucket in the federal deficit. Still, it is a start, though I have doubts the Republicans in Congress will have the spine to follow through on these cuts, especially with the elimination of National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. All three have essentially become propaganda operatives for the left and the Democratic Party, so there is good reason for Republicans to cut their funding. The problem is that the left will squeal like pigs if these cuts go through, and the ability of the Republican leadership to withstand that squealing has generally been nil.

Nonetheless, it is definitely worthwhile to read this list of agencies that are on the chopping block. Almost all of them have accomplished little with their funds, other than pay the salaries of the bureaucrats who run them. In the private sector they would be gone in a nanosecond.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

16 comments

  • Orion314

    And yet, not one single criminal federal “WORKER” of ANY STRIPE, FROM HRC ON DOWN, has been indicted, arrested, or been locked up yet. It’s not that I doubt the intent or will of President Trump, it’s he clearly does not have the support to drain the swamp…We can’t vote our way out of this governmental collapse anymore. I had a last, slim hope left, but it’s game over. When the sheeple let JFK get his head blown off in broad daylight in ’63. without the slightest murmur, I knew it was game over for the good old USA, I was only 8 yrs old, but I read the goat entrails with no problem. NOW, In terms of corruption, our federal government looks like Mexico 1865. Nothing short of a multi-million man march on D.C. is going to give the needed support to restore this country to a respectable status. Before you take umbrage with my thoughts, I’m USAF T/S CLEARANCE, HONORABLE DISCHARGE. I gave 4 yrs of my life to this country I love. I paid my dues, how ’bout the rest of you? Robert Heinlein espoused the idea that only people who gave military or PEACECORP type public service should have the right to vote because they earned it. Hmm, it has merit…

  • wayne

    Orion314–
    Don’t forget Lois Lerner– she’s busily collecting her pension and will do so, totally unencumbered, for the rest of her life.

    Referencing the alleged, show-boating, proposed budget cuts, that will never (ever) happen, ever;
    Congress has not held Budget Hearing’s for 6 years, and they aren’t starting now.
    Mitch, Ryan, and Priebus– they love all these Programs and have been Fund-raising against them, their entire political careers.
    –This is a red-meat List of fantasy-cuts, aimed at placating the conservative wing and making it look like “swamp-draining” is proceeding. (all lies) I find it hard to believe Trump would expend political capital on any of them, and the fact that Ryan doesn’t have off-the-shelf legislation ready to kill these programs outright, is very telling.
    Main stream media will spend at least a week on each of these, further diverting us all from reality.
    The big money is in the social-welfare Programs. We have 40 million people alone, on SNAP.

    (Just wait until the Export-Import Bank is resurrected. Need I remind anyone– Obama gave the Persians pallets loaded with currency… but the US taxpayers WILL be expected to backstop & finance their commercial aircraft purchases from (nominally) US companies.)

    The Feds spend $4 billion a year alone on free cell phones, and Carlos Slim is a major beneficiary of that program through his various cell-phone companies that contract with the Feds to provide all these “free” cell-phones.

  • It does appear that I like to look at a glass as half-full, and Orion314 and Wayne like to see it has half-empty. :)

  • wayne

    It’s just that I’ve seen this Movie before, and it always ends the same way. The exact same way.

    “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”

  • Tom Billings

    It is no surprise to me that small stuff like these 19 agencies is first to get done, if it gets done. Each wave of reaction against industrial society has a steeper front and a long slowly declining back side to the wave, from aristocratic reaction, to racist reaction, to socialist reaction, to scriptural literalist reaction, to “environmentalist” reaction. We are at the confluence of several waves, giving us a much higher total peak in people attempting to suppress industrial freedoms of action.

    Still, I believe that *if* we continue resisting each wave we will find they are even now dropping. That does not mean there is no danger. I know of several people who drowned on the Oregon coast, on the back side of waves that swept them off their feet and into the undertow. We could see that happening as a society, in both the US and in the rest of industrial society around the world.

    The purposeful destruction of industrial society by undercutting its knowledge base has been growing in academia since at least 1885, when progressivism began its climb to dominance. That, too, is finally being exposed for what it is, and academia is being deserted by students and even by some of their parents. As alternatives to academia are built that drop its anti-industrial doctrines, we will find revival of industrial freedoms.

  • Wayne: Sure, I’ve watched the same movie myself, many times in the past fifty years. However, things can and do change. If in 1986 you had said that the Soviet Union was going collapse and disappear from the face of the Earth (as Reagan did), you would have been called all sorts of names for expecting the impossible.

    But the impossible can happen. The Soviet Union is gone, and many people, including Russians, are better off because of it.

    Trump is surely not the president you or I wanted. However, he is not the president the elite Washington crowd wanted either. This is why I am both hopeful, but very cautious.

  • Diane Wilson

    I’ll take the perspective that the glass has been over-engineered to provide surge capacity.

    Yes, I do believe that change can still happen, although the swamp does get bigger each year. I fear that the progressive takeover of our educational system will have longer term repercussions than any mere supreme court justice.

    By the way, US Navy, 6 years, TS/SCI/Compartmented clearance, honorable discharge. I was cleared for everything on Hillary’s server except the diplomatic traffic.

  • hondo

    A good start on what will be a long and bumpy journey.

  • PeterF

    Orion314 and Diane Wilson, Thank you for your service.

    Bob, have you verified this list of agencies on the chopping block? The article doesn’t give a source for the information and I would hate to invest any portion of my mortality on “fake news”.

    That being said, regardless of the predicted demise of these government teat suckers, I believe that this coming budgetary fight (and there will be a fight) will define what we can expect from the Trump presidency.

    President Trump is in an incredibly strong position for this showdown if he is in fact serious about draining the swamp.

    Paul RINO and the pussycats in the house will propose another continuing spending bill (was an actual budget EVER approved under Obama?) ( I wonder if speaker RINO realized that it was going to be due so soon after Easter recess? I suspect the timing was planned)
    Anyway, he will submit a bill. It may include some (minor?) cuts to the aforementioned 19 agencies (or not). It almost certainly will include some sort of funding mechanism for a southern border wall. That will guarantee that almost no democratics (if they insist on being called the democratic party then that makes them democratics!) will vote for it.
    He will submit the bill, secure in the knowledge that budget bills cannot be filibustered and require only a simple majority to pass, which he will guarantee with some lard slathered on to please his fellow RINOs.

    This is where President Trump’s unique position will give him power that has not been enjoyed by a president since FDR sold his soul to the socialists.

    If there is anything, ANYTHING, in the bill that the president doesn’t like, he can veto it. The RINOs do not have enough votes to override a veto. No democratic will vote to override a veto that would fund a border wall. The MSM will stamp their feet and gnash their teeth because the insane person who “stole” their election is shutting down the government! SO WHAT.
    If they don’t like the way he is exercising his constitutional duties they can vote for somebody else in November 2020.

    The RINOs have two choices if they decline to see who blinks first.
    1) They can rewrite the bill so that they can get enough democratics to vote for it, AND override a veto. (that would require them to decide if the pork they would have to include is worth being primaried. (coming very soon, maybe even during the average American attention span). Or
    2) They can rewrite the bill so that the president will sign it. If that happens, the MSM will stamp their feet and gnash their teeth some more! IMO if that happens, the “silent majority” will turn out en mass for the midterm elections. President Trumps approval ratings will increase dramatically. (Remember when Bush 41 said “read my lips”?) (too bad for him he didn’t REALLY mean it) and Glenn Beck will end up buying the bankrupt MSNBC through a third party broker. (he didn’t get the All jizzy network because he announced what he was doing before the deal was final.)

  • Keith

    I don’t think any of the other Presidential candidates, if they had been elected, would have even proposed a budget which eliminates a single agency … or federal employee, for that matter.

  • mpthompson

    I agree with Keith’s point. Does anyone think another any Dem or GOP candidates for President the last 25 years would push a proposal to eliminate even one single agency? Yeah, these may be minor and a drop in the bucket, but sheesh, we gotta start somewhere. Even with these, the Dems will scream bloody murder, and if these do get cut the electorate may realize: “Hey, the sun still does rise the next morning after cutting government. Perhaps we should do some more.”

  • Commodude

    Governmental divisions never die, they just get buried. Consider the Rural Electrification Administration. Started with FDR and the New Deal, it was “ended” during the Reagan administration. “Ended” in this case means folded into another division of the government, saving not one sous.

  • PeterF asked: “Have you verified this list of agencies on the chopping block? The article doesn’t give a source for the information…”

    This list is real. It comes from the budget blueprint that the Trump administration released in mid-March. My March 16, 2017 post about it even included this same list of agencies, but without the extra detail provided by the story above.

    We must remember that the president doesn’t write budgets, he can only suggest them. It will be up to Congress what happens, and based on the wimpiness and back-stabbing nature the Republican leadership, I have dim hopes that most of these cuts will happen.

    Still, as I said, this is a start.

  • Edward

    Milton Friedman had another, perhaps better but harder to perform, “movie” in mind:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEVI3bmN8TI (1 minute)
    “It’s nice to elect the right people, but that isn’t the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.”

  • Steve Earle

    wayne said:

    “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”

    That perfectly describes what I see around me now….. :-(

  • wayne

    Steve Earle–
    -should have given credit to:
    “The Second Coming”, by W. B. Yeats
    https://youtu.be/KP7-mXNYhDE
    (2:09 very short poem)

    I’ve found the “..lack all conviction..” & “…passionate intensity,” sentiment/contrast, to apply to folks in the Human-Services realm when they get burned out, –myself included at times.
    (I’m sure you’ve encountered this in public-safety.)

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