🔒As Trump proposes cuts, his budget singles out two CT towns

The Trump administration has singled out Greenwich and Waterford for “wasteful” uses of federal funding, for things such as theater projects, in its latest budget proposal. Throughout the 92-page document, the White House ticked through programs across the country it would like to pare back — or eliminate entirely — and highlighted several examples within each program. The examples are overwhelmingly in blue states. The specific funding allocations in Connecticut aren’t in danger now since they have already been appropriated by Congress for the current fiscal year, but the office that manages one of those grants in Greenwich said the loss of future funding would be “devastating” to all states. Presidential budgets are a wish list of priorities for the upcoming year. Nonetheless, the administration sought to put a spotlight on them to advocate for steep cuts. One of those is the Community Development Block Grant program, which benefits low- and moderate-income people. President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating that program in all six of his budget proposals across his two terms. And for the past two years, his budget requests have named Greenwich, along with a couple of other cities and states, for how they’ve used their federal grant. It claims the town “in Connecticut’s famously affluent ‘Gold Coast'” has spent it on “wasteful projects,” pointing to spending on a theater arts program and pool renovations. But it’s familiar territory for the town of Greenwich. Tyler Fairbairn, the community development and grants administrator for the town, noted the language was a “cut and paste” from Trump’s last budget proposal a year earlier. Fairbairn said the $3.3 billion program has been “fortunately saved by Congress every time.” “In all 50 states, it’d be a huge loss to see CDBG go away,” Fairbairn said, referring to the Community Development Block Grant administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The annual grants aim to support housing, economic development, infrastructure and public safety for those in need. Fairbairn said Greenwich is one of 23 recipients in Connecticut that receive HUD’s community development grants. Over the past five years, the town has received a total of around $3.7 million, with an average of about $750,000 a year, that puts Greenwich in the “middle of the pack” compared to other towns in the state. Over the past decade, Fairbairn said, about 95% of beneficiaries are low and moderate income people — exceeding the 70% threshold they need to meet. When Greenwich receives its annual allocation, it accepts applications from nonprofits who “know what the needs are.” While the administration argued that the program serves “ideological pet projects and failed to target funding to communities in need,” Fairbairn said HUD approves all of the funding Greenwich allocates and they submit a performance report to the agency. “We never had a problem with it,” he said. Greenwich has dispersed its CDBG funding to a range of projects, including a domestic abuse services center at the local YWCA, support for food banks and entrepreneurial training for young women who are “income-eligible” in the town’s public schools. One of the program it supports is Coffee for Good, a coffee shop that provides paid training for up to 24 people with developmental disabilities. Greenwich gave about $5,800 to the organization through the federal block grant. While Greenwich has been named two years in a row, the latest budget request also mentions the small town of Waterford in New London County. Like dozens of other projects across Connecticut, a theater in Waterford was the recipient of federal funding through congressionally appropriated funds formerly known as earmarks. The budget didn’t specifically name the theater. In the most recent full-year government funding bills, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center got $1.6 million for renovations of its historic campus. The earmark was requested jointly by Connecticut’s U.S. senators as part of funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. USDA’s Community Facilities Program is eligible for congressionally directed spending, the name given to Senate earmarks in 2021. Under that USDA program, it can provide grants to counties or towns, federally recognized tribes and community-based nonprofit organizations “to build essential community facilities in rural areas with populations of 20,000 or fewer people,” according to the Congressional Research Service. The White House seeks to cut $659 million from the Community Facilities Grant Earmarks for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1. “What was historically a program providing low-cost credit to rural communities has morphed into a pork-barrel spending program for wasteful earmarks to areas that are arguably the least in need,” Trump’s budget document reads. The money for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center is a tiny fraction of the federal funding that Connecticut secured in earmarks for this fiscal year: more than $190 million to support over 175 projects across the state. Dozens of towns and cities saw a windfall in federal funding whether for fire house renovations, police training, boosts for museums or transportation projects. The town of Waterford declined to comment, noting the theater directly applied for the federal earmark. Representatives of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A deeper look at Trump’s budget proposal

Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2027 calls on Congress to significantly boost defense spending by 43% as the U.S. remains involved in war with Iran. It also recommends cuts to non-defense spending by 10% compared to 2026 levels. The budget request provides a sense of what the administration would like to cut in the future as states and local communities still reckon with cuts or freezes to federal funding since Trump returned to office early last year. Connecticut approved an emergency relief fund to address some gaps in federal aid for human services. The proposed cuts are rarely enacted in full. Congress and its appropriations committees craft and pass spending bills to fund government agencies and often veer from the suggested cuts and investments. “[T]he Budget maintains investments in border security and immigration enforcement while protecting the Nation from threats of terrorism; delivers on the President’s commitment to support law enforcement and ensure they have the tools, technology, and resources necessary to keep themselves and Americans safe; and honors the Nation’s sacred obligation to military veterans,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought wrote in the budget released on Friday. The document was released amid an ongoing, record-long shutdown of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The budget requests $63 billion in funding the agency for the upcoming fiscal year, including billions of more dollars for immigration enforcement agencies like ICE and Border Patrol. The current deal before Congress to reopen DHS would fund the entire department with the exception of those two agencies. They are already getting significant funding that was approved as part of the “big beautiful bill” last year, and Republicans are again trying to pass additional funding through party-line legislation by this summer. While it also requests investments in the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Secret Service, the DHS portion of the budget proposes reductions to FEMA non-disaster grants and the privatization of TSA airport security screening. For the latter, the White House wants to see small airports begin enrolling in the Screening Partnership Program where “TSA pays for private screeners at designated airports.” Under this proposal, most government agencies would see a reduction in spending. But several of them would see an increase in funding including the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Justice. Defense spending would see one of the biggest boosts: an increase of more than $440 billion compared to current levels. That would bring its budget to about $1.5 trillion for FY 2027. The budget document notes that it would also “maintain or increase the procurement of existing battle force platforms” including Columbia-class and Virginia-class submarines that are primarily manufactured in Groton-based Electric Boat. While the budget puts the U.S. Department of Education “on a path to elimination,” the proposal would keep Title I funding at $18.4 billion and a provide a $10.5 billion increase for Pell Grants. But overall, it would decrease agency spending by 2.9% Other human services and domestic programs would see cuts. Under the Health and Human Services Department, it would seek — for the sixth time — an elimination of the $4 billion Low Income Household Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), a program that New England states have come to depend on particularly in the winter months. It would also cut $5 billion in research conducted by the National Institutes of Health. Both have bipartisan support in Congress. On the housing front, HUD would see a 13% decrease in its discretionary budget compared to current levels. On top of the recommended cuts to homeless assistance programs, it also proposes eliminating the $1.3 billion HOME Investment Partnerships Program. It’s a federal block grant program that seeks to boost the building and buying affordable housing and providing rental assistance to low-income households. The budget request argues that states and localities are better equipped to solve housing affordability issues. Yet that appears to contradict Trump’s support for a bipartisan housing legislation, which would reauthorize and modernize the HOME Investments Partnership Program. The bill passed the Senate overwhelmingly, but challenges lie ahead in the House. And as the Trump administration takes aim at renewable energy, in particular its efforts to stop work on Revolution Wind, it proposes cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget in half as well as reducing the Interior Department. While the Energy Department would see an increase, the document notes the government “will no longer subsidize intermittent energy forms that destabilize the grid or Green New Scam projects that increase consumer costs and promote radical leftist policies.” The cuts to domestic programs and prioritization of military spending reflect Trump’s comments last week at a private luncheon from the White House. He suggested that federal health care programs and child care should be handled by each state, while the government focuses on “fighting wars.” “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.” The usual partisan squabbling will occur as Congress starts the process of crafting a new round of government funding bills ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline — though Republican chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Susan Collins of Maine, said the proposal “has several shortcomings.” “For example, the proposal includes unwarranted funding cuts in biomedical research. It would also terminate worthwhile programs like LIHEAP, which helps low-income families and seniors to pay their energy bills during the cold winter and hot summer months, and TRIO, which assists low-income, first-generation students in pursuing higher education,” Collins said in a statement. U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, argued that the budget request would worsen cost of living issues. As the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, she’ll have a major role in negotiating and drafting funding bills for the new fiscal year. “In total, according to their own numbers, the Trump budget would cut domestic investments by $73 billion, or 10%,” DeLauro said in a statement. “Under Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought’s plan, costs will continue to rise, Americans will be less safe and less healthy, while the corruption we have seen in this administration will become even worse.”