Report: House Budget Plan Will Hurt Americans

The budget proposed by the House of Representatives will harm millions of children, students, seniors, and people with disabilities, according to a new report by the Coalition on Human Needs. 

“A Better Budget for All: Saving our Economy and Helping Those in Need” identifies a number of harmful cuts to domestic program funding, including cuts that will:

• Deny Head Start services to 218,000 children
• Discontinue rental assistance for 10,000 Americans with long-term disabilities, which would result in most of them losing their homes
• Reduce allocation of Pell Grants for 9.4 million low-income college students
• Close 127 Community Health Centers over the next year, which would deny 11 million patients access to health care
• Terminate job training and employment services to more than 8 million youth and adults
• Suspend delivering food packages to 81,000 low-income seniors and children

The report evaluates the current budget proposals in Congress and concludes that lawmakers should focus on investments that will grow the economy and increase jobs. According to the report, “These proposals would try to reduce the deficit immediately, while the economy is still fragile; they would address the deficit solely or primarily by cutting spending, instead of balancing revenue increases with budget cuts; and they ignore many forms of wasteful spending, including tax loopholes and bloated military budgets.”

“Cutting only from a portion of domestic spending that constitutes less than a fifth of our total budget simply cannot solve our federal deficit and debt, but it will cause enormous pain and cripple our economic future,” said Coalition on Human Needs Executive Director Deborah Weinstein.