President Donald Trump released his budget proposal Friday, including $163 billion in nondefense spending cuts (a 22 percent reduction) that will be achieved “by reducing or eliminating programs found to be woke and weaponized against ordinary working Americans, wasteful, or best left to the States and localities to provide,” according to a White House fact sheet. Defense spending, meanwhile, will receive a 13 percent bump and the Department of Homeland Security will see its budget jump by 65 percent, presumably to enact the president’s disastrous immigration policies.
Like other presidential budget requests before it, Trump’s is mostly a messaging document that bears little resemblance to a budget and is unlikely to be fully enacted. Still, a key theme of the proposal is ending funding for what Trump has called “the Green New Scam.”
The budget proposal takes aim at several offices within the Energy Department and calls for $15 billion of cuts from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Specifically, the budget blueprint cancels the Carbon Dioxide Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act, a $2.1 billion program designed “to establish and carry out a carbon dioxide transportation infrastructure finance and innovation program.” The program is “of so little interest that not a single dollar has been awarded to date,” according to the White House.
The U.S. currently has a little more than 5,000 miles worth of pipelines specifically designed to transport carbon dioxide (CO2), which have primarily been used for enhanced oil recovery. The Energy Department estimates that the U.S. will need at least 30,000 miles of these pipelines to transport CO2 from industrial operators to underground storage sites to reach stated greenhouse gas reduction targets by 2050. The current deficiency has less to do with private sector interest—Exxon spent $4.9 billion in 2023 to buy a CO2 pipeline company—and more to do with onerous regulations.
Environmental justice initiatives at the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will see some of the steepest funding reductions under the proposal. While protecting marginalized communities from the impacts of pollution is important, the federal government’s environmental justice approach has focused on unrelated social goals. Congressional lawmakers are considering meaningful reforms to the permitting process, which would make it easier to build clean energy facilities and do a better job of protecting these communities than federal programs have.
The proposal also includes cuts to federal funding grants from the EPA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to groups that Trump says “advance the radical climate agenda.” Every year, the EPA “awards more than $4 billion in funding for grants and other assistance agreements,” according to the agency’s website. In the past, funding has gone to the Audubon Society ($156 million in revenue in 2023). NOAA has funded large nonprofits, including Ocean Conservancy ($48.6 million in revenue in 2023). While these groups do good and important work, they need not be financed by taxpayers.
The Trump budget proposal is unlikely to be passed in its entirety, which is good considering the many examples of wasteful spending in it. (Why do taxpayers need to front $500 million for Make America Healthy initiatives that nonprofit groups can pursue?) But Congress should consider halting grants to many other nonprofit groups as well. As the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency have shown, the federal government is too intertwined in our lives. Removing this dependency will be better for the private sector, nonprofits, and taxpayers in the long run.
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