Trump budget proposal would cut deep in Delaware
President Donald Trump's budget proposal would cut a wide swath through some popular programs in Delaware, from the elimination of Public Broadcasting to the Sea Grant program, which provides $1.5 million annually to the University of Delaware, to a $499 million cut in a federal program that gave $10 million in 2013 to rehab a wharf at the Port of Wilmington.
Trump’s budget also would pledge $500 million to increase funding for opioid addiction treatment.
Delaware and neighboring states receive millions of dollars annually from the federal government for everything from road infrastructure to grants and loans for rural water and sewer infrastructure and to pump sand on beaches and dredging it out of the Delaware River shipping channel.
Over at the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay, President Dennis Rochford said he was making his way through Trump's budget to see how it might impact local transportation.
Of particular interest, he said, is how it could impact the Delaware River Deepening and the programs that support shipping, among them the TIGER grants, which are used for transportation infrastructure – and the wharf project.
Besides Wilmington, other ports in the region such as Paulsboro in New Jersey and Packer Avenue Marine Terminal in Philadelphia are upgrading, he said.
But the budget is silent on big Army Corps programs like beach restoration and the Delaware River deepening project.
Instead, the Corps has a lump sum budget amount without line item designations so far. It is cut by 17 percent from the current fiscal year.
Rockford said the deepening project has huge economic development implications for the region.
Trump's budget proposal also would eliminate grants for Community Development Financial Institutions. Backed by the U.S. Treasury, they promote economic development in low-income communities by providing financial services to people underserved by traditional banks. There are three in Delaware.
One based in Dover, the National Council on Agricultural Life and Labor Research Fund Inc., provides loans for affordable housing and community health centers.
Karen Speakman, deputy director of NCALL, said the cuts would hit low-income, minority businesses the hardest.
“This cut, along with a number of other cuts being proposed, will mean less affordable housing units, and we already have an affordable housing crisis,” she said. “I think it will result in more homeless people.”
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The budget is just a proposal and has to be approved by Congress, but Speakman fears Republicans will likely provide little opposition to the proposed cuts.
“We will have to work with Congress, but in Delaware we have three Democrats representing us,” she said. “When the public starts to understand what these cuts mean, maybe they will put pressure on Congress to come to a more reasonable approach.”
At the University of Delaware College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, the loss of $1.5 million in federal Sea Grant money along with $600,000 provided by the state, would have big implications both in outreach and education and research programs, said Mohsen Badiey, acting dean.
"It will have a multidimensional effect," he said.
Delaware has had a Sea Grant program for 40 years, and scientists at the University of Delaware have researched everything from oyster disease in the Delaware estuary to fisheries, climate change, tourism and coastal issues.
As the issues have changed, so has the program focus.
For the last decade, former Sea Grant researcher Wendy Carey did work on rip currents and more recently she worked with a coastal engineer and Beebe Medical Center emergency room doctor to see if they could parse together data to determine when people are most likely to be injured in the surf.
Scientists look at the health of the ecosystem and how people can best live in a changing coastal environment, he said.
As promised, the president seeks to cut all funding for the federal Environmental Protection Agency for international climate change programs, eliminate climate change prevention programs and the pledges made to U.N. Climate Change programs and trim $250 million from coastal research programs that help communities get ready for rising sea level and more intense storms.
The budget proposal would eliminate the $73 million program from the Environmental Protection Agency's budget. Doing so "returns the responsibility for funding local environmental efforts and programs" to states and local jurisdictions, "allowing EPA to focus on its highest national priorities," according to the budget's authors.
The cut, if enacted, would come at the halfway point in the restoration effort. In 2010, the Obama administration partnered with six states and the District of Columbia on a "pollution diet" to reduce the amount of ecosystem-wrecking nutrients and other pollutants streaming into the iconic bay and its tributaries.
Under that plan, $59 million of the current $73 million is given over to state and local jurisdictions, financing projects ranging from helping farmers meeting their cleanup goals to city storm sewer upgrades.
The deadline for completing the work is 2025.
A new Delaware River and Bay program was approved by Congress last year but hasn't been funded.
“A budget is a reflection of our values as a nation; numbers are black and white, and they show clearly where our priorities lie and what we as a society hold dear," said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del. "President Trump’s first budget unequivocally confirms that his priority is appeasing his most extreme supporters rather than governing in a responsible way. To call these cuts draconian would be an understatement. They go far beyond what any reasonable Republican would propose, which is why so many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have already said this proposal is dead on arrival. This budget blueprint is in no way a serious policy proposal – it is an irresponsible, political statement that, if ever enacted, would make our country less safe, put Americans’ health and safety at risk and leave the most vulnerable among us in dire straits."
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While it is still too early to tell how much of a proposed increase in opioid treatment funding could make its way to Delaware, some in the treatment field praised the idea.
“It is very positive to hear that,” said Mike Barbieri, director of the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services. “We have focused on that over the last several years, and our system is expanding, but we still need more support.”
The News Journal has chronicled the state’s inability to get control of the nationwide problem of opioid addiction, even as the state increases the number of beds available for detox and recovery and enacts other programs. In the first 10 months of last year, 181 people died in Delaware from overdoses, according to state figures.
Barbieri said additional federal grants could help the state hire more recovery coaches that can assist with treatment.
“That is especially important in working with women who are pregnant and struggling with addiction,” he said.
Likewise, additional funding could provide more addicted Delawareans with access to medication-assisted treatment and counseling services.
“Medication is important and helps a person stay off the street and get themselves back in order, but with that you also need good counseling,” Barbieri said. “We’d hopefully be able to expand both.”
State arts groups are armoring up to protest cuts that would carve about $600,000 in humanities money and at least $693,000 in arts funding out of state programs. That’s how much the National Endowment for the Arts gives to the Delaware Division of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Arts gives to the Delaware Humanities Forum. Some arts program also get direct funding in grants from the NEA, rather than through state agencies, and that amount was not clear Thursday.
“It doesn’t come as a shock to us, and we are prepared to push back because in Delaware, the arts and humanities are an integral part of what we do and who we are,” said Marilyn P. Whittington, executive director of the forum. That organization pays for programs that help university professors go into lower grade classrooms, creates programming about state history and brings exhibits from the Smithsonian Institute to small towns. One planned project will focus veterans who have returned from recent wars.
“Delaware wouldn’t be Delaware without its arts and humanity community,” Whittington said. “We’re the First State. We have celebrated that history since it happened two centuries ago.”
The federal arts money is about 18 percent of the state art budget, said Paul Weagraf, director of the state Division of the Arts. Losing it would mean cutting back on funding for 70 programs, probably losing some staff and losing the power to promote the state’s offerings that reach 1 million people a year, Weagraf said. Cuts could affect artist residencies, programming for special needs students and programming in libraries and parks.
While some members of Congress previously have tried to kill funding for arts and humanities, this is the first time a budget from the White House has tried to do that, Weagraf pointed out. But the budget process is a long one, he noted, and Congress will be able to introduce all kinds of bills affecting the proposed budget.
Winners in the budget include defense spending at a proposed $500 billion, money for some water and wastewater infrastructure and additional funding for some homeland security programs.
In education, the Trump budget makes major shifts in spending, with a proposed $168 million gain for charter schools and creation of a new school choice program at $250 million. But it would make $3.7 billion in cuts for programs to train teachers and for summer and after-school programs. It also would reduce federal work-study for college students.
State education spokeswoman Alison May, in an email, said the proposed cuts could have a "significant" impact for Delaware's students and teachers.
For example, the cuts in the federal program that helps prepare and retain top teachers "would be a loss of about $10 million that directly goes to Delaware schools to fund things such as teacher salaries and professional learning for educators," she wrote. "The 21st Century Learning grant cut would be a loss of about $5.7 million, which funds school and community-based organization partnerships to provide academic, artistic, and cultural enrichment opportunities to low-income students and their families during non-school hours."
One of the big losers is the EPA, where programs would be cut by 31 percent. The cuts would include a large reduction in staff.
That would "cripple the capacity of the agency to protect and restore coastal waters," said Chris Bason, executive director of the Center for the Inland Bays. Besides the Chesapeake, large initiatives in San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound are also proposed for cuts.
The center is part of the National Estuary Program, and it has not been specifically identified, he said.
"This version of the budget does cut "other geographic programs," which could include the Estuary Program," he said. "On the bright side, the Estuary Program has strong bipartisan support in Congress. It was reauthorized for five years in 2016, and this month the House formed an estuary caucus to understand the problems facing estuaries and how to fix them."
Bason said there are other concerns with the budget.
"In addition to clean water programs, the cuts to carbon pollution reduction programs and climate change research would particularly affect communities in Delaware," he said. "Communities are flooding more due to rising water levels and extreme precipitation events, and we need to understand more, not less, how our warming climate is affecting the health and safety of people, bays and fisheries."
Contact Molly Murray at (302) 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj.
Reporters Jeremy Cox in Salisbury, Maryland, and Jeff Mordock, Jessica Masulli Reyes and Betsy Price in Wilmington contributed to this story.