What do you get when a climate-change denying president appoints a climate-change denier as director of the Office of Management and Budget?
You get a climate-change denying budget.
The Trump administration’s “Taxpayer First” (FY 2018) is the epitome of climate-change denial. Not only does it propose draconian cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, eviscerate federal climate change-related programs in all federal agencies, reduce federal spending on science research, and cut all funding of international climate change programs; but it also shreds the social safety net, severely reduces infrastructure spending, and guts foreign aid that has helped (however problematically) lift people out of severe poverty.
In other words, it is a budget that guarantees the federal government – at a moment when we actually need to take collective, radical climate action – will function neither as a force that can galvanize us all to meet effectively the climate crisis, nor as the people’s protection against climate-change related catastrophes of our own making.
Taxpayer First instead reaffirms the “three policy pillars of the neoliberal age – privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending” – all of which, as Naomi Klein writes in This Changes Everything, are “incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels,” and in an equitable and socially just manner. These actions include wartime-level public spending on infrastructure repair; massive investment in wind, water and solar energy; the transformation of our mega-agricultural systems that are major sources of emissions; and, the reordering of our emissions-intensive system of trade. They are actions that must of necessity be taken hand-in-hand with the expansion of the social safety net, for the economic consequences of our need to reduce drastically emissions (8-10 percent a year) over a relatively short period of time are far-reaching.
The denial in Taxpayer First goes even deeper, however, for this indecent document makes clear that the cuts proposed actually constitute the framework by which the denialist Trump administration (with a little help from congressional and corporate fellow travelers) hopes to make climate-change denial itself not only structural, but also the logic upon which the federal government operates. Indeed, the administration seeks to free up the government so that it can perform – and encourage us to perform – as if there is no climate change cliff that we are dangerously approaching.
But that is not all. Through this cruel budget the deniers in charge are effectively asserting that a robust, people-centered and climate-responsible government is itself a climate change hoax that must be thoroughly exposed, debunked and abandoned. In its place must stand the “truth,” i.e., a government that gives free reign to corporations, rewards the wealthy with significant tax cuts, makes citizens responsible for their own welfare, and considers environmental regulations wholly unnecessary. In its place, in other words, must stand a government that is the triumph of truth over climate change fiction, the heroic unmasking of a grand and expensive lie perpetrated by the left (and colluding scientists) that, in the end, has wasted everyone’s money (to paraphrase OMB Director Mick Mulvaney). Of course, such a government cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, honor the Paris Accord.
The cynicism of Taxpayer First cannot be overstated. It is, quite simply, a declaration of war on all life, waged by people for whom climate-change related catastrophes (like the floods in Sri Lanka) and even human extinction are acceptable risks in the quest for profit and power. It is further proof that deniers would rather see a scorched earth than admit the failures and destructiveness of their neoliberal gospel of wealth, consumption and trade – that they would rather, in fact, destroy everything than see a world organized around the redistribution of wealth and the protection of our only home.
And it is further evidence, finally, that we will have to be the radical climate action we have been waiting for.