CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY,
AUGUST 4, 2017, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D.ELIAS
"TRUMP BUDGET LOOKS
INCREASINGLY VENGEFUL"
Is it political vengeance or merely a
Republican President trying to make budget cuts on everything that’s not
military?
That’s the real question about Donald
Trump’s first budget as it moves through congressional committees en route to
becoming reality. It’s a question that reverberates especially on the West
Coast, where not just California, but Oregon and Washington, too, voted heavily
against Trump in last year’s election. The mid-Pacific state of Hawaii also
strongly opposed Trump.
The latest proposed budget victim
coming to light is the life-saving tsunami detection system that gives early
warning to all four of those states (and Republican Alaska) whenever a major
earthquake strikes anywhere around the Pacific Rim’s so-called “Ring of Fire,”
where those quakes sometimes produce enormously destructive tidal waves thousands
of miles from the epicenters.
Before the system of 39 deep-sea
sensors and floating, tethered buoys existed, a tsunami measuring at least 20
feet tall slammed into Crescent City, near the California-Oregon state line in
1964 with very little warning. It decimated the city’s harbor and killed 11
persons who could not escape the city’s harbor in time.
The early-detection system was in
place by 2008 when a tsunami of similar size struck the same place. No one died
because there was ample warning.
Now Trump seeks to cut most of the $12
million federal contribution to maintaining the warning system, reducing staff
from 40 full-time positions to 15 and cutting out one of the two tsunami
warning centers. He also would end $6 million in safety grants to tsunami-prone
states.
This proposal comes at the same time Trump seeks to eliminate the
$10 million annual federal contribution to an under-construction earthquake
early-detection system that could provide between 30 second and two minutes of
notice before large quakes, thus potentially saving hundreds, perhaps thousands
of lives.
Both these systems have had strong
backing from both Republican President George W. Bush and his Democratic
successor, Barack Obama and it’s looking like a House committee may restore all
the funds. That would not change Trump’s intent.
Before Trump, there was a realization
that even if a state went strongly against the eventual winning presidential
candidate, the same state nevertheless contained millions of voters who went
for the winner. That was how it went in California last year, when almost 4.5
million state residents voted for Trump, even though Democrat Hillary Clinton
carried the state by the widest margin since the Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.
Trump’s losses in Washington, Oregon and Hawaii were almost as wide.
There is, of course, no plan for quake
warnings on the East Coast, where almost no such shakes occur, but the tsunami
warning system does cover Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland and
Virginia, all states with low-lying coastal areas, and all of which went
Democratic last year.
Cutting the federal contributions to
these systems would be a classic case of being penny-wise and pound-foolish, if
a natural disaster should hit without warning and destroy many lives along with
billions of dollars in property. Spending by the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, even under Trump, would likely dwarf the less than $28 million involved
here. That spending could be cut substantially if there were sufficient warning
for vehicle owners to get their cars and trucks out of tsunami zones or place
valuable but fragile possessions in safe places before an earthquake arrives.
Unless, of course, Trump should decide
that residents of the states involved are not as American as other citizens and
decline to issue post-disaster emergency declarations that free up grant money.
Meanwhile, California would be hit
harder than other states if Trump’s much larger planned spending cuts on things
like Medicaid, public education and homeland security grants are ratified by
Congress. The putative Medicaid cuts alone could lop $24 billion a year worth
of California health care, an amount the state’s recent budget surpluses cannot
make up.
It’s still too early to say for sure that
all this is pure political revenge for voting against the President. But the
more Trump presses cuts in programs that disproportionately affect states like
California, which voted against him, the more plausible become suspicions of
vengeance.
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
