While everyone else was gearing up for the Stormy Daniels fiasco, Barack Obama passed (for the most part) his budget last Friday.
From Russell Berman of The Atlantic:
President Obama finally got a Republican-controlled Congress to fund his domestic budget. All it took was Donald Trump in the White House to get it done.
In the $1.3 trillion spending bill that President Trump reluctantly signed on Friday, lawmakers did more than reject the steep cuts in dollars and programs that Trump proposed for domestic agencies a year ago. Across much of the government, Republican leaders agreed to spending levels that matched or even exceeded what Obama asked Congress to appropriate in his final budget request in 2016—and many of which lawmakers ignored while he was in office.
Amazing how prescient this nation’s last real President was!
The Department of Health and Human Services received $78 billion, nearly identical to the $77.9 billion Obama sought and almost 20 percent more than what the Trump budget called for. Ditto for the Department of Labor and the Department of Education, which got $1.5 billion more than Obama’s final request and nearly $12 billion more than the reduced level Trump sought. Obama-era priorities like Head Start and Pell Grants drew increases, too.
The lesson here is not only that most of President Obama’s budget numbers were right on target...because he hired, you know, competent people to calculate them—but the fact that Trump’s were so grossly off the mark as to be too embarrassing for even the Republican-dominated Congress to stomach:
Congress eliminated none of the 18 independent agencies Trump wanted to scrap, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And several of the programs he wanted to zero out won huge increases instead. Take the TIGER grants, an infrastructure program created by Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package. Congress had allocated $500 million to it each of the last several years, despite annual Obama requests to boost it to $1.25 billion. Trump’s budget called for axing it entirely, but lawmakers went even higher than Obama, giving $1.5 billion to TIGER. Or the Community Development Block Grant, a federal housing program that had been receiving $3 billion from Congress annually. Obama actually proposed cutting its funding by $200 million in 2016, while Trump called for chopping it altogether. In the end, it received $3.3 billion—a 10 percent boost.
As Berman points out, this was a budget enacted under complete Republican control (hopefully, come November, the last time that will happen in American history).
And there was no shortage of whining by Republicans about it. Ben Sasse (R-NE) admitted that the budget would likely have been unanimously rejected had a Democratic President been in charge, while Rand Paul suggested the budget “could have been written” by liberal Democrats. Conversely, Senator Charles Schumer said it represented ”one of the most significant investments in the middle class in recent history.”
There was a lot wrong in the budget—failing to secure protection for Dreamers under DACA, and huge, pointless increases in military spending, which many Republicans admitted was the impetus for them to go along with the budget in the first place. The impact of these foolhardy military increases will be to explode the deficit, which seems to be par for the course for any Republican Administration. But the degree to which Trump’s own budgetary suggestions were rejected was highly unusual, indicative of the fact that this Administration simply did not put forth any effort to hire competent staff—including their choice of Mick Mulvaney as budget director.
By early afternoon, [Trump] had signed the omnibus, but not before delivering a rambling speech in which he vowed never to approve such a bill again, called for a line-item veto that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional in 1996, and reiterated his demand for eliminating the Senate’s legislative filibuster—a step that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has repeatedly rejected.
That’s called “losing.”