Five Ways Trump’s Proposed Budget Hurts the Working Class

In fact, White House budget requests are often ignored. But they reveal where a president’s priorities lie, and this one shows how unserious Trump is as a champion of the country’s working class. Here are just five ways this proposal would hurt the working class if Congress takes him up on it.Food programsTrump’s budget would roll back a 2024 rule that increased the amount of fruits and vegetables available to recipients, cutting current benefits by more than half. “By slashing the fruit and vegetable benefits and not ensuring sufficient program funding, this administration is taking healthy foods away from children and mothers most at risk for nutritional deficiencies,” Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the National WIC Association, said in a statement. The federal nutrition guidelines had prioritized increasing access to fruit and vegetable, but Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scrapped them in favor of protein, contrary to the latest nutrition science.Trump’s budget would also cut other food benefits, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and summer and afterschool meals for kids. Working- and middle-class families rely on these programs at some point in their lives, and fully funding them would ensure more Americans have access to the kinds of whole, healthy foods that officials like Kennedy tout. Cutting them will cause more Americans will go hungry, especially as food prices continue to rise. Assistance for electricity billsA small federal program known as the Low Income Energy Assistance Program helps almost seven million families pay for heating and cooling costs. The program disproportionately benefits the elderly and disabled who live on fixed incomes, and can also be used in some states to weatherize old houses or prevent utility shut-offs in emergencies. Trump’s budget would scrap it entirely, promising to “instead support low-income individuals through lower energy prices and an America First economic platform.”That promise seems especially laughable given that energy prices rose 7.1 percent last year and are likely to rise even more as the war in Iran, the disinvestment from green energy production, and increase in new data centers continues to raise energy costs.Career and Technical EducationCareer and Technical Education, formerly known as Vocational Education, has undergone a renaissance in the past few decades. Once considered a second-tier educational track where students were neglected, a reinvestment and revival in CTE has helped many students access well-paying careers in trades while also providing an alternative path to college.The Trump budget would advance plans to dismantle the Department of Education entirely, which would eliminate CTE funding and move it into the Department of Labor, something the administration has already tried despite legal challenges from Democrats. Advocates say it would return the program to the “bad old days.” CTE is meant to be a broad-based education program that empowers students no matter where their careers take them, but under the Department of Labor it risks becoming a more narrow, short-term, job-training pathway. That move would also pull money out of K-12 and community college systems that offer those programs now.Grants for rural and minority-run small businessesTrump’s budget would eliminate special programs for small rural businesses and minority owned entrepreneurs. It claims that the small-business administration already accomplishes these goals, and that targeting traditionally underserved populations is “woke” and “racist.”It would cut the Rural Business Development Grant program, intended to help small programs with fewer than 50 employees and less than 1 million in gross revenues. In the past these grants have been used to train young and organic farmers and build commercial facilities that can help farmers prepare and transport their products to market, among other programs, all of which benefit entrepreneurship in rural areas with few job opportunities. The budget also eliminates a loan guarantee program with similar goals. Because these programs are small and not often immediately profitable, it’s harder to get private funding for them.The budget would also eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency, which has helped working-class Americans of color start or expand their businesses and helped diversify some fields, like bringing more women into construction trades. These populations were targeted for this special program because they’re disproportionately likely to struggle to get loans elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration claims that that mission is itself divisive and discriminatory. Together, these programs allow working-class Americans to build and create businesses in communities often overlooked by traditional financing. Without government investment, they could disappear.Low-income housing programsA number of programs that aim to expand homeownership, both to people and communities, are on the chopping block. The budget would eliminate Community Development Financial Institutions, which bring financial institutions to communities that traditional banks ignore. They provide a range of financial services, including mortgages to low-income families buying their first homes. The Trump budget would also cut a program that has helped build more than 1.3 million affordable homes since 1992. And it would continue calling for a new Department of Housing and Urban Development policy to stop issuing rental assistance vouchers to new families.Cutting these programs does not save the federal government much money, especially when compared to the increased defense and immigration spending called for elsewhere. It’s also not a new agenda. Republicans have been cutting the social safety net for decades, dismantling the federal government infrastructure meant to help people and leaving everyone vulnerable to the whims of the free market. For all the lip-service Trump has paid to working-class Americans during his campaigns, this is just more evidence he’s always been a corporate-first Republican, serving the wealthy and the warmongering at the expense of everyone else.