- Donald Trump has revealed his new budget proposal, which includes a $54 billion increase in defense spending.
- The budget blueprint also includes cuts to agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, State Department, Agriculture Department, Labor Department, and Health and Human Services.
- The proposed budget has been criticized for its severity and the impact it will have on certain programs and groups.
- Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, created the budget by using Trump's past statements and turning them into numbers.
- The budget cuts have been seen as a reflection of Trump's priorities and have raised concerns about the impact on the environment and international development.
- Some of the cuts heavily impact groups that voted for Trump, such as rural airports.

- The budget includes cuts to subsidizing rural airports, which could negatively impact Trump supporters who rely on these airports for air service.
- Even some Republicans are critical of the budget cuts, calling them draconian, careless, and counterproductive.
- Trump's defenders argue that this is just a negotiation, but if the budget passes, it may anger Trump's own voters.
- Trump himself has said that if you don't deliver on promises, people will eventually catch on, and it seems that people are starting to catch on.

Donald Trump's federal budget plan proposes large funding cuts with largely negative consequences. John Oliver examines the troubling priorities of the new administration.

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We wanted to take a quick look at the federal budget.

The only beach read less appropriate than Bill Cosby's Little Bill, 1 Dark and Scary Night.

And this week, Donald Trump, a man who constantly promised that he would run America like a business, gave us our clearest sense yet of how he plans to do that.

The president revealing his new budget proposal just moments ago.

dramatic change in the federal government since World War II.

This is a budget blueprint from the President of the United States, a document that he puts out there.

It is the way that he would like the government to be funded and what his priorities are.

What's known in Washington as a skinny budget, which sounds like a line item that Trump might have included in 1 of his pre-nups.

So, try and think of it, this budget, as a presidential mood board.

The mood board of a president whose mood can always be described as impatient, vain, and horny for malice.

The budget blueprint calls for a 54 billion dollar increase in defense spending.

On the left, you see a department's getting an increase, That would be defense, homeland security, veterans affairs, the agencies facing cuts, the Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department, the Agriculture Department, the Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and the list goes on and on.

It is sort of fitting that the list of budget cuts scroll by like the end credits for America.

-♪ ♪ -♪ Thanks for helping us out, Agriculture Department.

Hope you find a gig with the next country that rises from our ashes.

And while this budget is very unlikely to pass in its current form, it is worth taking just a few minutes to look at it.

Partly because it gives us a clear sense of our president's priorities, but also, because it gives us a chance to get to know yet another 1 of the Trump administration's key characters.

There's Steve Bannon, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs banker, who somehow constantly looks like he just woke up on a park bench after losing custody of his children.

--LAUGHTER --There is, Kellyanne Conway, the brave survivor of a terrorist attack she completely made up.

--LAUGHTER --Uh, and there's Stephen Miller, the least popular boy at vampire school.

Well, for this budget, we got to know Mick Mulvaney, whose name, when spoken in my accent, sounds like what you'd call a random Irish person if you're trying to get him to fight you.

He is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and I'll let him give you just a glimpse into the highly scientific process by which he put this budget together.

We came at it, actually wrote the budget by going through the president's speeches, going through the interviews he had given and talking to him directly and finding out what his priorities were.

We took those words, those policies, and turned them into numbers.

Basically, Mulvaney treated Trump's past statements the way Trump treats women.

Randomly singling out a few of them and then reducing them down to numbers.

But that cannot have been easy when you think about it, because translating the noises that come out of Trump's face into hard policy prescriptions is almost impossible.

Take this statement on military spending.

You gotta make the country rich again, and strong again, so that you can afford it.

And so you can afford military and all of the other things.

To be honest, it sounds like the audio book of a farewell to arms broadcast by an iPhone submerged in hot coffee.

But apparently Mulvaney heard increased defense spending by $54 billion because that is what he's proposing.

And as for the budget's funding for nuclear weapons, they presumably have their bases in statements like this 1.

Putin has built up their military again and again and again.

He's doing nuclear, we're not doing anything.

Our nuclear's old and tired, and his nuclear is tippy-top from what I hear.

I don't know how you turn that into policy.

Let's trickle-dickle some money bunnies into our boom-boom budget.

We're aiming for tippy-top people, because remember, we're talking about the most lethal weapons in the history of mankind.

Now, that apparently means a $1.4 billion increase for the National Nuclear Security Administration, while cutting the Department of Energy's overall budget by 1.7 billion.

But to be honest, I can't be certain, because I don't speak fluent toddler psychopath.

Now, These cuts have made headlines for their severity, but no 1 can say they're surprised by who is on the receiving end of some of the worst of them.

For instance, his 31% cut to the EPA is really just making good on some pretty clear words.

Every week, they come out with new regulations.

We can leave a little bit, but you can't destroy businesses.

We can leave a little bit of the environment.

Specifically, this fish, this bit of crabgrass in Utah, and 1 of these meerkats.

So, don't get too attached, 1 on the right.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And look, there is nothing wrong with cuts in principle.

But with budgets, as with haircuts, It's where and how you cut that matters.

And believe me, I say that as a grown man who had bangs on national television for 7 years.

And it is important to note, non-defense discretionary spending is already at its lowest level relative to GDP in over 15 years.

Lower than any year of Reagan's presidency.

And that's what makes something like Trump's proposed 28% cut to the budget for the State Department and USAID so frightening.

Although, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson doesn't seem that worried about it, and 1 of the reasons he gave for that was a little surprising.

What the president is asking the State Department to do is, I think, reflective of a couple of expectations.

1 is that as time goes by, there will be fewer military conflicts that the U.S.

You honestly think we're gonna have fewer military conflicts under President Trump?

He just needs 1 person to tell him that World War I was called the Great War, and he's going to want to have a better 1 out of sheer pettiness.

And making big cuts to things like the State Department, International Development, and the EPA isn't just short-sighted, it doesn't even make fiscal sense.

The EPA is currently responsible for .2 percent of federal spending, and the State Department and USAID are 1.4 percent.

So you don't cut those agencies as a cost-saving measure, you do it as a fuck you.

It is the budgetary equivalent of inviting Mitt Romney out to dinner at Jean-Georges before not offering him a cabinet position.

And I will say, that was awesome, by the way.

Trump is so consistently monstrous, sometimes out of sheer coincidence, he happens to do something amazing.

Trump is truly the stopped clock of assholes.

But his pettiness extends even further when it comes to some of the tiny items his budget eliminates funding for, like the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which last year made up less than .02% of federal spending.

But according to Mulvaney, it is unfair to expect people to even pay that much.

When you start looking at the places that will reduce spending, 1 of the questions we asked was, can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?

We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can't ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Okay, that argument isn't just insulting, it's absolutely ridiculous.

Because while, yes, the military keeps single mothers safe, on a day-to-day basis, Bob the Builder is an actual lifesaver for them.

--LAUGHTER --Declan, honey, Mommy's gonna lie down for a little bit while you watch yourself some Bob.

And if, if your real concern is for the hard-earned dollars of single mothers and coal miners, Let's break that down, shall we?

Because if your single mother needs to work and her child attends a school, she might need access to something like Wings for Kids, an after-school program that serves 1,600 children in 3 states.

Under President Trump's new proposed federal budget, Wing's primary source of funding would be eliminated.

Jessica Williams has 2 daughters in the program.

And again, I say that as a man who no 1 stopped from going into a Supercuts with a photo of Demi Moore in Ghosts and saying, this, but worse.

And as for Mick Mulvaney's hypothetical coal miners, let's take a look at what trumps budget cuts from the Appalachian region.

1 of those programs at risk of losing all funding is the Appalachian Regional Commission, which funded 35 different projects and programs in Tennessee alone last year.

And that list includes things like the Healthier Tennessee Communities Initiative, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Tennessee Valley, and the Governor's Books from Birth Foundation.

All of which contain so many positive words.

I'm presuming that also in line for cuts are the Kid, Kitten, Heart Hat Alliance, and the Grandma's Wish Coalition for warm cookies straight from the oven.

The cookies will be thrown away, the grandma will be put down.

And by the way, by the way, those cuts are coming in a state that went for Trump, which leads us to the weirdest thing of all here.

Some of the cuts in Trump's budget heavily impact groups that voted for him.

We spend money to help subsidize rural airports where they otherwise couldn't have air service.

Now, maybe that doesn't make any sense in an ideal world.

who are gonna lose their airports if we stop doing that are the people who voted for Donald Trump.

Trump's rise was fueled by people in red states who were justifiably irritated that liberals sometimes refer to them as flyover country.

But this budget could literally turn some of them into flyover country because there would be no other option.

And even some Republicans are now wary of this budget.

Hal Rogers, a Republican and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, went so far as to call many of the cuts draconian, careless, and counterproductive.

And a Republican saying that about budget cuts is like a toddler telling you, -"This balloon fucking sucks!" -$30,000!

And look, Trump's defenders will say that this is just him being a businessman.

The sort of thing that you could learn all about in his book, The Art of the...

Wait, I seem to be betraying everyone who supported me.

Anyway, let's talk about all the trim I got in the 80s, right, fellas?

-♪ ♪ -♪ Hunger monger ♪ But if anything resembling this budget passes, many of Trump's own voters will likely wind up getting burnt, and they are going to be angry, and Trump himself should know that, given that in the art of the deal, he said this.

You can't con people, at least not for long.

You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press.

But if you don't deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

It's taking longer than is perhaps ideal, but I think pretty soon, all of us will be fed up, right up to the tippy fucking top.


Speaker 0: We wanted to take a quick look at the federal budget. The only beach read less appropriate than Bill Cosby's Little Bill, 1 Dark and Scary Night. And this week, Donald Trump, a man who constantly promised that he would run America like a business, gave us our clearest sense yet of how he plans to do that.

Speaker 1: The president revealing his new budget proposal just moments ago.

Speaker 2: It is promising the most

Speaker 3: dramatic change in the federal government since World War II.

Speaker 4: This is a budget blueprint from the President of the United States, a document that he puts out there. It is his wish list. It is the way that he would like the government to be funded and what his priorities are.

Speaker 0: Yes, this budget is simply a blueprint. What's known in Washington as a skinny budget, which sounds like a line item that Trump might have included in 1 of his pre-nups. So, try and think of it, this budget, as a presidential mood board. The mood board of a president whose mood can always be described as impatient, vain, and horny for malice. So, what is in this thing?

Speaker 5: The budget blueprint calls for a 54 billion dollar increase in defense spending. Take a look at this graphic. On the left, you see a department's getting an increase, That would be defense, homeland security, veterans affairs, the agencies facing cuts, the Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department, the Agriculture Department, the Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and the list goes on and on.

Speaker 0: You know what? It is sort of fitting that the list of budget cuts scroll by like the end credits for America. -♪ ♪ -♪ Thanks for helping us out, Agriculture Department. Hope you find a gig with the next country that rises from our ashes. And while this budget is very unlikely to pass in its current form, it is worth taking just a few minutes to look at it.

Partly because it gives us a clear sense of our president's priorities, but also, because it gives us a chance to get to know yet another 1 of the Trump administration's key characters. Because we've met most of them by now. There's Steve Bannon, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs banker, who somehow constantly looks like he just woke up on a park bench after losing custody of his children. --LAUGHTER --There is, Kellyanne Conway, the brave survivor of a terrorist attack she completely made up. --LAUGHTER --Uh, and there's Stephen Miller, the least popular boy at vampire school.

Well, for this budget, we got to know Mick Mulvaney, whose name, when spoken in my accent, sounds like what you'd call a random Irish person if you're trying to get him to fight you. He is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and I'll let him give you just a glimpse into the highly scientific process by which he put this budget together.

Speaker 3: We came at it, actually wrote the budget by going through the president's speeches, going through the interviews he had given and talking to him directly and finding out what his priorities were. We took those words, those policies, and turned them into numbers.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Basically, Mulvaney treated Trump's past statements the way Trump treats women. Randomly singling out a few of them and then reducing them down to numbers. But that cannot have been easy when you think about it, because translating the noises that come out of Trump's face into hard policy prescriptions is almost impossible. Take this statement on military spending.

Speaker 2: You gotta make the country rich again, and strong again, so that you can afford it. And so you can afford military and all of the other things.

Speaker 0: I don't know what that was. To be honest, it sounds like the audio book of a farewell to arms broadcast by an iPhone submerged in hot coffee. But apparently Mulvaney heard increased defense spending by $54 billion because that is what he's proposing. And as for the budget's funding for nuclear weapons, they presumably have their bases in statements like this 1.

Speaker 2: Putin has built up their military again and again and again. Their military's much stronger. He's doing nuclear, we're not doing anything. Our nuclear's old and tired, and his nuclear is tippy-top from what I hear. -...again.

-...again.

Speaker 0: I don't know how you turn that into policy. Let's trickle-dickle some money bunnies into our boom-boom budget. We're aiming for tippy-top people, because remember, we're talking about the most lethal weapons in the history of mankind. So if we can, tippy-tippy-top. Now, that apparently means a $1.4 billion increase for the National Nuclear Security Administration, while cutting the Department of Energy's overall budget by 1.7 billion.

But to be honest, I can't be certain, because I don't speak fluent toddler psychopath. Now, These cuts have made headlines for their severity, but no 1 can say they're surprised by who is on the receiving end of some of the worst of them. For instance, his 31% cut to the EPA is really just making good on some pretty clear words.

Speaker 2: Environmental protection? What they do is a disgrace. Every week, they come out with new regulations. They're making it impossible.

Speaker 6: Who's gonna protect the environment?

Speaker 2: They... We'll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit, but you can't destroy businesses.

Speaker 0: We can leave a little bit of the environment. Specifically, this fish, this bit of crabgrass in Utah, and 1 of these meerkats. So, don't get too attached, 1 on the right. -♪ ♪ -♪ And look, there is nothing wrong with cuts in principle. But with budgets, as with haircuts, It's where and how you cut that matters.

And believe me, I say that as a grown man who had bangs on national television for 7 years. Cool? Cool. Cool. And it is important to note, non-defense discretionary spending is already at its lowest level relative to GDP in over 15 years.

Lower than any year of Reagan's presidency. And that's what makes something like Trump's proposed 28% cut to the budget for the State Department and USAID so frightening. Although, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson doesn't seem that worried about it, and 1 of the reasons he gave for that was a little surprising.

Speaker 6: What the president is asking the State Department to do is, I think, reflective of a couple of expectations. 1 is that as time goes by, there will be fewer military conflicts that the U.S. Will be directly engaged in.

Speaker 0: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on there. You honestly think we're gonna have fewer military conflicts under President Trump? There is simply no way that is true. He just needs 1 person to tell him that World War I was called the Great War, and he's going to want to have a better 1 out of sheer pettiness.

And making big cuts to things like the State Department, International Development, and the EPA isn't just short-sighted, it doesn't even make fiscal sense. The EPA is currently responsible for .2 percent of federal spending, and the State Department and USAID are 1.4 percent. So you don't cut those agencies as a cost-saving measure, you do it as a fuck you. It is the budgetary equivalent of inviting Mitt Romney out to dinner at Jean-Georges before not offering him a cabinet position. And I will say, that was awesome, by the way.

Trump is so consistently monstrous, sometimes out of sheer coincidence, he happens to do something amazing. Trump is truly the stopped clock of assholes. But... But his pettiness extends even further when it comes to some of the tiny items his budget eliminates funding for, like the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which last year made up less than .02% of federal spending. But according to Mulvaney, it is unfair to expect people to even pay that much.

Speaker 3: When you start looking at the places that will reduce spending, 1 of the questions we asked was, can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs? The answer was no. We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can't ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 0: Okay, that argument isn't just insulting, it's absolutely ridiculous. Because while, yes, the military keeps single mothers safe, on a day-to-day basis, Bob the Builder is an actual lifesaver for them. --LAUGHTER --Declan, honey, Mommy's gonna lie down for a little bit while you watch yourself some Bob. He's the only man I trust anymore. -...

And if, if your real concern is for the hard-earned dollars of single mothers and coal miners, Let's break that down, shall we? Because if your single mother needs to work and her child attends a school, she might need access to something like Wings for Kids, an after-school program that serves 1,600 children in 3 states. And guess what?

Speaker 7: Under President Trump's new proposed federal budget, Wing's primary source of funding would be eliminated. Bridget Laird is the CEO. How does that make you feel?

Speaker 8: It makes me feel devastated.

Speaker 7: Jessica Williams has 2 daughters in the program. What happens if it goes away?

Speaker 8: I really don't know how I could... I really don't know. I will be lost.

Speaker 0: Okay, so that is a really bad cut. And again, I say that as a man who no 1 stopped from going into a Supercuts with a photo of Demi Moore in Ghosts and saying, this, but worse. -♪ This, but worse. -♪ This, but worse. And as for Mick Mulvaney's hypothetical coal miners, let's take a look at what trumps budget cuts from the Appalachian region.

Speaker 1: 1 of those programs at risk of losing all funding is the Appalachian Regional Commission, which funded 35 different projects and programs in Tennessee alone last year.

Speaker 0: 35 programs in just Tennessee. And that list includes things like the Healthier Tennessee Communities Initiative, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Tennessee Valley, and the Governor's Books from Birth Foundation. All of which contain so many positive words. I'm presuming that also in line for cuts are the Kid, Kitten, Heart Hat Alliance, and the Grandma's Wish Coalition for warm cookies straight from the oven. The cookies will be thrown away, the grandma will be put down.

And by the way, by the way, those cuts are coming in a state that went for Trump, which leads us to the weirdest thing of all here. Some of the cuts in Trump's budget heavily impact groups that voted for him.

Speaker 9: The 1 that strikes me is rural airports. We spend money to help subsidize rural airports where they otherwise couldn't have air service. Now, maybe that doesn't make any sense in an ideal world. Maybe on principle, that's a bad thing. But the people

Speaker 0: who are gonna lose their airports if we stop doing that are the people who voted for Donald Trump. So, think about that. Trump's rise was fueled by people in red states who were justifiably irritated that liberals sometimes refer to them as flyover country. But this budget could literally turn some of them into flyover country because there would be no other option. And even some Republicans are now wary of this budget.

Hal Rogers, a Republican and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, went so far as to call many of the cuts draconian, careless, and counterproductive. And a Republican saying that about budget cuts is like a toddler telling you, -"This balloon fucking sucks!" -$30,000! Really? I really thought you liked those. And look, Trump's defenders will say that this is just him being a businessman.

It's a first offer, it's a negotiation. The sort of thing that you could learn all about in his book, The Art of the... Wait, I seem to be betraying everyone who supported me. Oh, well, forget it. Anyway, let's talk about all the trim I got in the 80s, right, fellas?

Hunger monger. -♪ ♪ -♪ Hunger monger ♪ But if anything resembling this budget passes, many of Trump's own voters will likely wind up getting burnt, and they are going to be angry, and Trump himself should know that, given that in the art of the deal, he said this.

Speaker 10: You can't con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press. And you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don't deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

Speaker 0: Oh, I think people are catching on. It's taking longer than is perhaps ideal, but I think pretty soon, all of us will be fed up, right up to the tippy fucking top. You

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Federal Budget: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)