Food. Health Care. Housing. Education. Air that is breathable and water that is safe to drink. The budget proposal the Trump administration released today would put all that in jeopardy in order to pay for huge tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations. This budget would jeopardize the health care, nutrition and education of our children, families and aging parents.  
 
Quite simply, this budget would devastate our economy and our families.
 
This budget proposal is shockingly callous and short-sighted. It provides a frightening glimpse into the priorities of this President: Building walls instead of building schools; investing in expensive new weapon systems instead of investing in children; and cutting taxes for millionaires and billionaires instead of cutting hunger, poverty and want. Congress must reject it in its entirety – declaring it DOA – and instead pass a federal budget that allows mothers, families, communities, small and medium businesses, and our economy to thrive.
 
For that to happen, jobs must pay a living wage, pay must be fair, family and medical leave must be available to all families for critical moments, high-quality and affordable early education, including childcare and pre-K, must be accessible, and we must all be able to live free from discrimination and gun violence. Trump’s budget proposal would do none of that; it is bad for women, mothers and families, rural communities, and especially toxic for immigrants, communities of color, LGBTQ+ families and all others who face bias and discrimination, threats and violence.
 
Almost every element of this budget proposal seems designed to jeopardize the wellbeing of our country’s low- and middle-income families. It would cut Medicaid by $800 billion, leaving millions of people -- many of them women and children -- without access to health insurance. In an unprecedented move against women's health, Trump's budget would prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving any federal funds -- even for critically important women’s health services like cancer screenings, Zika and HVI/AIDS testing, and family planning – even though Planned Parenthood health centers are the only health care providers for millions of women. It would strip $193 billion over the next ten years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps 40 million people put food on the table. It even zeroes out funding for popular programs like Meals on Wheels and afterschool and summer programs, which are hugely beneficial to low-income children and the elderly.

 
Our nation already isn’t doing well at all when it comes to income inequality – Trump’s budget would only worsen this problem. In fact, the United States of America is now the third worst nation in terms of income inequality -- after Chile and Mexico -- among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The high level of income inequality in our nation led MIT economist, Dr. Peter Temin, to recently state that we’re regressing to developing nation status as we’re largely becoming a two-track economy with a vanishing middle class. Trump’s budget doubles down on the faulty two-track economy direction and is just another nail in the coffin for the middle class.
 
With this budget, Donald Trump isn’t making America great; he’s breaking America.
 
We are not placated or fooled by the inclusion of so-called paid family leave in this budget proposal. The Trump paid leave plan is wholly inadequate and sets working families up to fail. It would not help families achieve economic security, not boost businesses and not help our economy thrive. It falls far short of what our country needs and would leave behind millions of workers who need time to care for their own serious medical needs or those of their loved ones. Working families need a comprehensive, consistent, robust paid family and medical leave program that lifts our economy, businesses and families: It needs to be accessible to all working people, offer a meaningful amount of leave, be affordable for businesses, working people and taxpayers, be inclusive in defining family, and include strong job protections.
 
Trump may call this plan ‘welfare reform,’ but all it does is create barriers to services that have a proven track record of lifting families out of poverty and putting them on a pathway to stability; as they also boost the economy. This budget doesn’t create jobs. It doesn’t even make a significant investment in job training. Instead, Trump’s budget takes a hatchet to everything from low-income housing programs to support for women in abusive relationships to working family tax credits like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. He cuts these programs so he can help pay for pet projects like his unnecessary wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and tax cuts for the wealthy.
 
President Trump’s priorities are not America’s priorities. He has no mandate to implement this dangerous budget and Congress must reject it. The more than 1 million MomsRising members will work tirelessly to defeat Trump’s budget proposal.