Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP
President Trump wants Congress to cut funding to state and local law enforcement that he calls ‘unauthorized and poorly targeted.’
Ask any pundit or centrist Democrat what hurt Democrats most in 2020 and they’ll tell you it was calls from far-left types to “defund the police.” Nobody in Congress or on the Biden campaign echoed it, but somehow this drove voters in droves away from Democrats, according to the theory.
Those voters might want to retreat back to the Democrats now, because, a week before he leaves office, Donald Trump has submitted a formal request to Congress to defund the police.
Specifically, he wants Congress to remove $244 million in state and local law enforcement assistance from a bill he signed just a couple of weeks ago.
In the same proposal, he’s trying to cut $4 billion from the U.S. contribution to an international effort to vaccinate the world against COVID-19.
These interesting priorities are part of a last-ditch effort that represents the latest in the Trump administration’s attempts to sabotage the incoming president, in ways large and small, on his way out the door. This one is easily countermanded, but only if the Biden administration takes action quickly. Otherwise, $27.4 billion in spending, including the above-mentioned items, will be held up for the first month and a half of the Biden presidency.
The gambit goes back to the COVID relief bill. After Congress reached agreement and advanced it through Congress, attached to an omnibus government-funding bill, Trump decided it wasn’t good enough. In addition to finding the direct payments too small, Trump complained that there was too much “wasteful” spending in the bill, unrelated to COVID relief. (It was unrelated because the spending was in the omnibus section of the bill, but let’s move on.) The spending in question was mostly foreign aid, and funny-sounding programs involving things like amberjack fish or Asian carp.
Trump eventually signed the bill on December 27 despite his objections, and he had to come up with an out for why he would do that and fund all these allegedly needless projects. So his administration came up with an out: Trump would send a rescission request to Congress. A provision of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, this allows a president to send an itemized list of budget cuts to Congress and ask them to pass a bill implementing the trims. The subsequent bill would only require a simple majority vote in both chambers of Congress.
“I will sign the Omnibus and COVID package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed,” Trump said in an announcement.
The rescission request wasn’t released until Thursday afternoon. It includes proposed cuts to 73 programs totaling $27.4 billion.
Of course, just because Donald Trump asks for budget cuts doesn’t mean that Congress has to provide them. The rescission request is nothing more than a president asking “pretty please.” Congress has 45 days to consider the president’s request, but if they just ignore it, the request dies. So Trump’s rescission request was nothing more than a face-saving measure.
The one thing rescission does accomplish, however, is that it holds the requested cuts in limbo until Congress decides what to do with the spending. Federal agencies in contact with the Prospect describe it as a hassle, as those funds must be segregated until rescission is dealt with in some way. Happening during a transfer of power just makes the process even messier.
The incoming Biden team does have an easy option, however. Bruce Meredith, a consultant who helped develop the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, told me that the rescission request “can be amended or withdrawn at any time by the executive ... Get it on Biden’s early-action list for the Office of Management and Budget to submit a formal withdrawal to Congress.”
That seems easy enough and well within Biden’s best interest.
Given that, all that’s left is to look at what’s in the rescission request, as compared to the “wasteful” spending in the omnibus bill Trump previously railed about.
You’ll be shocked to know that really none of the specific objections Trump raised appear in the rescission message. Instead, there are a lot of programs conservatives generally disfavor, including some really tone-deaf objections, considering the current circumstances.
The most amazing cut, given Trump’s persistent law-and-order rhetoric, is for a $244 million Justice Department program that assists state and local law enforcement.
For example, the largest cut in the proposal would cancel $5.1 billion for Global Health Programs, in the middle of a pandemic. The program “funds activities related to child and maternal health, HIV/AIDS, and infectious diseases” (emphasis mine). Specifically, $4 billion in cuts would defund the GAVI program, which concerns itself with vaccinations in the developing world, including the COVID vaccine. That’s combined with a $2.1 billion cut to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), an enormously successful effort to curb HIV/AIDS infections and deaths in the developing world.
Other proposed cuts include a zeroing out of the $392 million budget for the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E), an R&D program for energy projects where the next energy breakthrough will likely emerge. There’s $2.16 billion in cuts to energy efficiency and renewable energy, $23 million out of the National Park Service, $181 million from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (after one of the worst hurricane years ever), $880 million out of student financial assistance, $230 million from the McGovern-Dole International Food Program (again, in the middle of a pandemic that has spiked global poverty), $212 million from the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency, $483 million from AmeriCorps, a combined $228 million from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, and $15 million from the National Gallery of Art. This is a long list of programs that conservatives and their big-money backers simply hate.
The State Department ($10.9 billion) and associated international assistance programs ($4.5 billion) would suffer the majority of the cuts, which is at least consistent with Trump’s rhetoric about wasteful foreign aid. Programs on the chopping block would include international peacekeeping, migration and refugee assistance, the Democracy Fund, Millennium Challenge grants for global development, the Global Environment Facility, the Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, and the Inter-American Foundation.
But the most amazing cut, given Trump’s persistent law-and-order rhetoric, is for a $244 million Justice Department program that assists state and local law enforcement.
The proposed cut would zero out the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which reimburses state and local governments for incarcerating undocumented individuals. A justification for the cut calls it “unauthorized and poorly targeted,” and claims that it only reimburses at 24 cents on the dollar—an odd point to make in favor of closing the entire program down.
Regardless of the justification, it’s just a plain fact that this would take $244 million away from state and local law enforcement, just a few months after Trump and his allies spent the entire presidential campaign decrying Democrats for wanting to defund the police.
Again, none of these cuts will go into place, and if the Biden team just immediately rescinds the rescission, it won’t even hold up the spending for very long. It’s just a little hassle that Trump has given his successor, on top of all the other ones. But the choice of cuts is revealing, at the end of four years of nonstop gaslighting. Practically everything Trump condemned in others was equally, if not more, true of himself. So too with “defund the police.”
