Trump targets three liberal favorites with ambitious budget cuts

By Thomas Phippen, DCNF

President-elect Donald Trump’s reported plan to gut federal spending by $10.5 trillion over the next decade includes eliminating three of iconic agencies defended as cultural mainstays by many Democrats.

The next administration is working on plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Hill reported Thursday.

Combined, the three departments cost around $741 million in 2016, and is a small part of a host of budget reforms needed to cut more than a trillion a year from the federal budget.

Eliminating funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which runs PBS and supports shows like Sesame Street, is not a new idea. Mitt Romney suggested cutting the CPB during the 2012 presidential campaign, and was quickly criticized. President Barack Obama even accused Romney of trying to kill Big Bird in a campaign ad.

Trump’s budget cuts align in many ways with the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) 2017 Blueprint for a Balanced Budget, which only makes $8.6 trillion in cuts.

“A free society should not have government-supported media outlets, especially ones that so often convey political news and opinion,” the RSC report says. “There is no shortage of media outlets and news services available to consumers,” the report said.

“The federal government should not be in the business of funding the arts,” the RSC said of eliminating the NEA and NEH.

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