Keepin’ Up With the Trumps One Budget Cut at a Time

            Over the last week or so, the cost of President Trump’s frequent trips to his Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago has been making the news. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump repeatedly said to great applause that once elected he wouldn’t be taking vacations or playing all that golf that Obama plays. He would stay in the White House “making deals.” But since assuming the presidency, Mr. Trump has, to date, gone to Mar-a-Lago seven times. While two of those visits involved meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping, others have not been for affairs of state. The Secret Service does not make available the costs for security, but estimates range from $1 million to $3 million per trip. These estimates do not include a number of associated costs, such as $60,000 in overtime pay each day for the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Department. President Obama spent around $97 million on travel during his two terms in office. Reports by CNN and The Hill suggest that President Trump could spend close to that amount in his first year alone.

            One more thing, Mr. Trump’s use of Mar-a-Lago (or any other of his major properties) contributes to the brand of these places, so taxpayers subsidize brand enhancement. Right after the beginning of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the yearly dues for Mar-a-Lago doubled, from $100,000 to $200,000. Value-added.

            If the President is vacating the White House, the First Lady is avoiding it altogether. Melania Trump has said that she maintains residence at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue because she wants to keep her son, Barron, in his current school. The cost for protecting Trump Tower is $500,000 per day, according to The Guardian. I could not determine how much of this cost is for New York police officers vs. Secret Service personnel or if the federal government reimburses the city of New York. Over one year, the cost for the First Lady and her son to stay in New York could be as much as $183 million. I wanted to compare the yearly cost of protection for President Obama’s two daughters to attend Sidwell Friends School in D.C., but could not find any numbers.

            Another expense associated with Donald Trump is the tax-payer supported cost for security for Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. whenever they travel for Trump family business. Again, the Secret Service does not release expenditures, but The Washington Post, CBS, and The Guardian were able to get some figures. A trip to Dubai to open a Trump-branded golf course resulted in a $16,000 hotel bill for Secret Service agents and a trip to a Trump-branded condominium in Uruguay resulted in a $88,320 hotel bill for Secret Service agents and other federal employees. These expenses are only for lodging (and possibly food); they do not include salaries, travel, equipment, and other expenses. The two Trump sons are the managers of the Trump estate, so these trips will occur with some frequency and have nothing to do with the United States government and do not benefit taxpayers in any way.

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            The Trump administration recently released its proposed budget, and it contained cuts to a long and wide list of programs and initiatives. A budget is not only an economic document but also a moral document, a statement of values. There are the predictable GOP targets: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The National Endowment for the Arts, and so on. But let us look at four less visible programs targeted for elimination—programs that directly affect the less fortunate—and compare their budgets to the Trump expenditures I just listed.

            The Delta Regional Authority and The Appalachian Regional Commission are two wide-ranging agencies that foster economic and workforce development, infrastructure improvement, and education and health programs. The Delta Regional Authority will lose $45 million in federal funding; The Appalachian Regional Commission will lose three times that amount. Both of these agencies cover parts of the country that are in great need—and that voted for Donald Trump in strong numbers. The president’s trips to Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, and his New Jersey country club—all lavishly developed—could over several years provide the budget for these agencies committed to fostering economic development in regions that desperately need it.

            The Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program is targeted toward students with disabilities or limited English proficiency, many of whom come from low-income backgrounds. The cut here would be $190 million, which is just about the projected annual expense for Melania Trump to maintain residence at Trump Tower and continue to send her son to the Trumps’ chosen school. The trade-off: one child with every educational resource and option imaginable versus many thousands of children with few options or resources.

            The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness has a small budget of $3.5 million and coordinates federal and state agencies that deal with homelessness and also serves to connect local agencies with available resources. It wouldn’t take many of Donald Jr. and Eric’s business trips to promote luxury properties to supplant this budget cut aimed at people who have no property at all.

            While writing this post, I found that the Center for American Progress Action Fund has just launched a website to track “time and taxpayer money the president expends at his South Florida Estate.” http://istrumpatmaralago.org/ This site will help you keep up with the Trumps in real time.

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            The conservative commentator Kevin Williamson has a point when he writes in National Review that the criticism about presidential travel expenses—Bush’s, Obama's, or Trump's—is overdone and overwrought, for the problem lies in the presidential entourage itself, which is "bloated and monarchical" and, in the scheme of things, travel "is small beans in the context of federal spending." OK, fair enough—though it should be said that what is small beans to one person is a whole bean field to another. Still, when travel and residential spending hits the levels it is hitting now, beyond the bloated norm with no sign of abating, and when that spending is connected to a president who pledged his allegiance to the Little Guy, and when that same president's budget includes substantial cuts to programs to aid the less fortunate, well… then the excesses are worthy of condemnation, for they represent not just a case of very bad optics, to use that tiresome buzzword, but a case of moral blindness.

I’ll close with a question that kept coming to mind as I was writing this post, a question from another time and place in our history and from quite a different context: The Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. It was the Cold War and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy had been conducting increasingly assaultive and unprincipled investigations on the infiltration of communists into various government departments and agencies, including the U.S. Army. After a particularly nasty exchange, Joseph Welch, the lead counsel for the Army, asked McCarthy in exasperation, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” I certainly thought of that question many times as candidate Trump insulted everyone from Mexican immigrants to a reporter with a disability. But the question seems fitting here as well, perhaps even more so, posed to President Trump and the entire Trump enterprise: Where is the decency here? At long last, where is your decency?

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