DeLauro Statement on Trump’s Roadmap of Destruction

WASHINGTON — House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) issued the following statement in response to the Trump administration’s plan for fiscal year 2026:

“Instead of tackling the cost-of-living crisis, President Trump’s 2026 budget request will make it worse. He promised to fight for the working-class but instead put Elon Musk and billionaires in charge of the government. They are attacking education, housing, cancer research, and investments in the middle class to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. We need the government to fight for the middle class, the working class, and the vulnerable. The government envisioned by President Trump and Elon Musk only serves billionaires and the biggest corporations. 

“This is not a budget. It is an all-out assault on our nation’s families, small businesses, and communities in every part of the country.”

Along with documents that leaked last month, the Trump-Musk budget would:

Raise the Cost of Living and Harm the Economy

• Increase energy costs for families and businesses by zeroing out the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, turning off the heat and air conditioning and raising costs for 6 million households across the country, and cutting $20 billion from the Department of Energy’s science and energy programs, including a 74 percent cut to Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
• Evict hundreds of thousands of seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities already on fixed incomes, and would force homeless shelters to halt operations at a time when more than 771,000 people are experiencing homelessness across America.
• Eliminate the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, forcing more than a thousand mayors and governors relying on the reinvestment of taxpayer dollars to walk away from critical street, water, and sewer improvements and services for youth and seniors, undoing promises made to their constituents to keep their communities safe.
• Decimate public education, including eliminating need-based financial aid for 1.7 million students by eliminating Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (SEOG); eliminate Federal Work Study opportunities for more than 500,000 students who need it to help finance a postsecondary education, limiting their potential earnings and future success in the job market; and eliminate vital academic services for more than 5 million English learners through the elimination of English Language Acquisition.
• Eliminate funding for the Economic Development Administration, an agency that helps create jobs, especially in rural areas.
• Halt essential flights to rural and small communities – from Alabama, to Iowa, Kentucky, and Kansas – while forcing airlines to foot the bill of the federal government and raise the costs of travel for everyday Americans.
• Eliminate Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Program, ending support for direct, reliable, and safe financial services in low- and moderate-income communities.
• Gut funding for job training programs for hundreds of thousands of dislocated workers, youth, and older workers, including the complete elimination of Job Corps.
• Cut IRS Enforcement, making it easier for the millionaire and billionaire tax cheats to evade paying their fair share, costing American taxpayers billions per year.
• Eliminate nearly half of the Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneurial Development Programs, including eliminating support for Women’s Business Centers and cutting by nearly half assistance services for veteran-owned small businesses.

Make Communities Less Healthy and More Vulnerable to Deadly Diseases

• Slash biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health by 40 percent, taking away lifesaving biomedical research to develop cures and treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and other diseases affecting millions of American families.
• Eviscerate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by eliminating dozens of life-saving public health programs, including HIV/AIDS prevention, tobacco prevention, asthma prevention, lead poisoning prevention, diabetes prevention, heart disease and stroke prevention, cancer prevention, maternal health and safety, emergency preparedness grants to States, global health assistance, and dozens of others.
• Slash funding for substance use prevention and treatment programs at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, sabotaging recent progress in addressing the opioid crisis.
• Hurt millions of people at home and abroad who face hunger by slashing the Commodity Supplemental Food Program and eliminating the Food for Peace and McGovern-Dole programs. This also harms the American farmers who will no longer see the profits from producing this urgently needed food.
• Harm public health by decimating funding for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by 55 percent, crippling the agency’s ability to perform rigorous scientific research and eliminating its ability to understand new and emerging contaminants like PFAS.
• Worsen America’s water safety and quality by slashing the EPA’s Clean Water and Drinking Water State funds by nearly 90 percent, meaning thousands fewer water infrastructure projects across the country.
• Increase Americans’ exposure to harmful air pollutants by eliminating air pollution control programs.

Make Americans Less Safe

• Eviscerate public safety, including slashing efforts to fight gun violence and international drug trafficking by making huge cuts to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Drug Enforcement Administration; eliminating thousands of FBI positions, including intelligence analysts who work to keep Americans safe; and eliminating funding for grants to prevent hate crimes, protect civil rights, provide restorative justice, reduce mass incarcerations and create safe spaces for LGBTQ+ victims of crime.
• Leave communities across the country more vulnerable to deadly storms by cutting weather satellite funding and severely hindering weather forecast capabilities.
• Create a slush fund for the President while abandoning our partners and allies around the world with an 84 percent cut to diplomats and development experts working to solve global challenges such as hunger, clean water, and conflict resolution.
• Abandon our trust and treaty obligations to Native Americans, making tribal communities less safe by cutting the Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement by 19 percent, and harming tribal economies by eliminating the Indian Loan Guarantee program for tribal business development.

“In total, according to their own numbers, the Trump-Musk budget would cut domestic investments by $163 billion, or 23 percent. However, until they show their math and provide additional detail, we do not know the full scope of the reduction. It could be far worse, up to a cut of $227 billion, or almost 35 percent. Republicans have proposed this while trying to cut as much as $880 billion from Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, slash Social Security, and freezing more than $400 billion owed to the American people.

“This is not even what so many of us refer to as a ‘skinny budget.’ I do not know what has taken this administration so long, but this document and the time it took to produce it are just the latest examples on a long list of ways the Trump administration has shown that Congress does not matter to them. The voice of the American people does not matter to them. They only care about making billionaires richer at the expense of the programs that help hardworking Americans.”

Fact sheet updated May 7, 2025, can be found here. 

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