Actions have consequences. Here is an example. Both the USDA and Dept. of Education help support our local schools. For the Owen-Withee School District that amounts to a total of $792,700 or 14% of the District’s budget, according to a new interactive map from the Department of Public Instruction. USDA provides $232,310 to the district and the Dept. of Education provides $560,390. According to the map the Dept. of Education funding helps pay for six full-time teachers.
What would permanently losing these funds mean for our kids if federal government funding freezes are not turned around? I am assuming that a good chunk of that USDA money goes toward seeing that students are fed. And what part of learning would students miss out on? This is only one school district. Is the state expected to somehow come up with those funds? Or are the taxpayers expected to find a way to make up that money and keep the doors open? President Trump has said he wants education to go back to the states. Maybe that is okay, but that requires a transition process. You can’t dump the Dept. of Education without having something in place to replace it, whether that be at the federal or local level. And, of course, there is the fact that this can apparently only be done by an act of Congress.
The consequences of the federal funding freezes/cuts go far beyond schools. Food pantries also rely on USDA help to serve their clients. Farmers rely on this funding to stay in operation. If we lived in a world where farmers were getting paid enough to sustain their business, that would be great. But that isn’t the reality. Without government subsidies, farmers will go under. Then who will grow our food? USAID was also a big purchaser of what our farmers grow. And a lot of their product was exported, which will now be affected by tariffs. There is a ripple effect here that will continue to grow.
We also need to think about those tariffs and how they are going to affect what each and every one of us pay. I’ve seen things about gas prices going down, but what I saw in my community is that they went up $.15 overnight when the tariffs hit. It won’t just be gas. It will be everything we buy. Again, it would be great if everything we need could be grown or made in America. That isn’t the reality we live in.
Or what about all the projects that have started because of the promise of government grants and other funding? What do they do now? How do their projects get completed if promised funding doesn’t come through?
What about all those government employees that have been told they no longer have a job? I am assuming they will collect unemployment insurance, so somebody somewhere is still expending money. What is really being saved by laying off people without looking at whether their jobs are really necessary? When they talk about layoffs at the IRS or Social Security, I think about the fact that you already have to sit on hold for hours to talk to a person. This is only going to make it worse. I don’t believe some computer AI program can determine the worth of someone’s job. This is why I am glad to see that at least a couple members of the president’s cabinet have stood up and said they want to run their own department and make personnel decisions. That seems to be a more sensible way of doing things. Get to know your department, get to know your people, then decide.
I feel some days like we are living in a country that has gone completely nuts. I hope for a day when common sense comes back into politics. But, maybe it was never there to begin with.