Commentary: Exploring the moon while cutting NASA? Why Trump's 2027 budget misfires
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The oldest, most enduring cliche about government policy is the one about how budgets are political, not fiscal, documents.The Trump administration’s budget proposal for the 2027-28 fiscal year, unveiled Friday, seems designed to set a new standard for partisan ideology as a spending standard.
You may have seen news coverage of the budget’s top lines, which call for $1.5 trillion in defense spending next year and cuts totaling $73 billion in nondefense spending.But those figures fail to communicate the raw flavor of the budget cuts or how they’re described in the 92-page document.
It’s an extinction-level event for science.— Casey Dreier, Planetary Society, on budget cuts at NASANor do they provide perspective for the magnitude of the defense increase or the damage that would be wreaked upon crucial social programs.The defense request, for instance, would be a 42% increase over the current year, but it might be better judged as what Todd Harrison of the pro-business American Enterprise Institute describes unhappily as “the highest level of funding for defense in US history, surpassing even the peak funding during World War II.” Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
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Adjusted to today’s dollars, Harrison calculates, the World War II peak was a bit lower than $1.2 trillion.The administration minimizes the overall budgetary effect of its spending plans by projecting average growth in gross national product at 3% annually over the next decade.That’s an ambitious goal, to say the least.
Over the last 25 ...