As someone who has closely followed and written about presidential budgets and social and anti-poverty programs for most of the past half-century, I examine here proposals advanced by former President Donald Trump during his years in office—mainly measures proposed in his administration’s annual budgets—that would affect social programs for people with low or moderate incomes. The piece relies primarily on analyses of these budgets by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) during those years, using data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Congressional Budget Office (CBO).¹ The piece builds upon earlier work that I and my colleagues at The Hamilton Project have conducted on the evolution of the U.S. social assistance and social insurance systems and the workings of those systems (Barnes, Bauer, Edelberg, Estep, Greenstein, and Macklin 2021; Greenstein 2022).

The Trump administration budgets were distinguished by their proposals to lower taxes and to scale back or end various social programs and other government spending. The proposed reductions in social programs fell primarily on programs for people with low or modest incomes rather than universal social insurance programs, although the Trump administration budgets did propose a reduction in one aspect of the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, as described below in the section of this piece on cash assistance.²

This piece examines program changes that these budgets proposed, rather than just those that were enacted. Most of the proposals described here did not pass Congress, including the administration’s 2017 effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that fell just short in the Senate. In addition, the courts blocked various regulatory proposals to scale back programs, including efforts to roll back the ACA through administrative action. (This piece does not examine temporary changes not included in administration budgets that Congress and the President made in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The program reductions or eliminations the Trump administration budgets proposed substantially exceeded those sought by earlier presidents, including Ronald Reagan, although the safety net in place when President Trump took office was significantly larger than that in place when Reagan assumed office more than four decades ago, giving President Trump more targets for budget reductions. Changes that Trump administration budgets proposed included the following:

• SNAP. Reductions of roughly $200 billion over 10 years, or about 25 to 30 percent, in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program), as proposed in all four Trump administration budgets.
• Medicaid/ACA. Substantial cuts in Medicaid beyond eliminating the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and in the first Trump administration budget, some scaling back of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The proposed reductions, including ACA repeal, totaled roughly $750 billion to $1 trillion or more over 10 years under the various Trump administration budgets.
• Housing and rental assistance. Large reductions in rental assistance and other housing-related programs that, in all four Trump administration budgets, included rent increases that would average more than 40 percent for about 4 million low-income households that rent their units with rental vouchers or live in public housing. The four budgets also called for eliminating various housing-related programs including the HOME program, the Community Development Block Grant, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).
• Cash assistance. Large reductions in cash assistance in all four Trump administration budgets, including (1) reductions in benefits for low-income children with disabilities through Supplemental Security Income (SSI) when more than one child or both an adult and a child in the same family receive SSI, (2) a reduction of more than $20 billion over 10 years in federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding to states, and (3) a reduction in initial Social Security disability benefits for some beneficiaries. The 2017 tax cut that President Trump signed into law increased the Child Tax Credit (CTC), though the increase for children in most poor families was modest. An estimated 10 million children—those in families with the lowest incomes, including families whose earner works full-time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—received either an increase of up to $75 or no increase. If these children’s families participated in various programs slated for cuts such as SNAP or rental assistance, those families would in most cases have lost more income from the program cuts (often substantially more) than they would have gained from the CTC increase.
• Non-defense discretionary programs. Deep cuts in “non-defense discretionary” (NDD) funding—the federal budget outside of defense, entitlements and other “mandatory” programs, and interest payments on the debt. The first Trump administration budget proposed an overall NDD level for fiscal year 2018 that would have been 13 percent below the 2017 enacted level and 25 percent below the 2010 level in inflation-adjusted terms and that would have reached its lowest level as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) in six decades. The proposed NDD reduction totaled $1.8 trillion over 10 years (Herrera and Friedman 2017). Under all Trump administration budgets, NDD funding would, by the tenth year, have been at its lowest level as a share of GDP since the Hoover years. Along with the reductions in low-income housing programs noted above, the proposed NDD reductions included reductions in various programs to strengthen the ability of low-income individuals to secure employment, as outlined in the next bullet.
• Self-sufficiency. Some administration officials justified various proposed reductions in benefits for low-income households by calling on individuals in those households to go to work or work more. At the same time, the Trump administration budgets also proposed to scale back a number of programs to strengthen the ability of low-income individuals to secure and retain employment. Trump administration budgets proposed to reduce job training funds for states and localities by 40 percent (in the first budget), reduce the Job Corps substantially (in the final three budgets), reduce various education, student aid, work-study, and other programs (all four budgets), and terminate the community service employment program (all four budgets). Some Trump administration budgets also proposed to increase funding for apprentice programs, though in dollar terms, those increases amounted to a small fraction of the reductions in education, job training, and related programs.

Trump administration budgets sought significant savings in other budget areas as well. The bulk of the proposed savings, however, fell on benefits and services for people of low or modest income. In the fiscal year 2018 Trump administration budget, for instance, while programs for people with low or modest incomes accounted for 28 percent of all non-defense spending outside of interest payments, those programs would have borne 59 percent of the reductions in non-defense programs ($2.5 trillion of $3.7 trillion in reductions over 10 years; Shapiro, Kogan, and Cho 2017). By the tenth year, overall spending for programs for people of low or modest incomes would shrink by 33 percent below the budget baseline (Shapiro 2017). A CBPP analysis of the final Trump administration budget (for fiscal year 2021) estimated that 44 percent of its proposed reductions would come from such programs (Kogan, Romig, and Beltran 2020).

The Trump administration also sought, via regulation, to limit or discourage participation in various safety net programs by certain low-income immigrants who were legally authorized to be in the United States and eligible for these programs—mainly, immigrants who had applied for permanent residence, or green cards (Bernstein, Gonzales, Karpman, and Zuckerman 2020). These regulations, which federal courts blocked in 2020 (Gonzales 2023), would have made it harder for such individuals to secure legal permanent residence status and ultimately become citizens if they had received program benefits.

SNAP

Trump administration budgets consistently sought SNAP reductions of $180 billion to $220 billion over 10 years, under OMB scoring, amounting to reductions of 25 percent to 30 percent below the budget baseline for SNAP (Dean 2017; Dean 2018; Rosenbaum, Dean, Bolen, Wolkomir, Keith-Jennings, Cai, and Nchako 2018; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd, and Parrott 2019; Kogan, Romig, and Beltran 2020).

The SNAP cuts comprised several elements. By the administration’s own estimates, they would have ended SNAP eligibility for about 3 million people with incomes between 130 and 200 percent of the poverty line or assets exceeding specified levels—$2,250 in 2019 ($3,500 for households with an elderly or disabled member), with a vehicle’s market value over $4,650 counting against these asset limits. To achieve these reductions, the administration proposed to end a SNAP state option that most states use, known as “broad-based categorical eligibility” (Rosenbaum 2019).³

The Trump administration budgets also would have ended SNAP’s minimum benefit, under which low-income households of one or two people that meet SNAP’s eligibility criteria receive a monthly benefit of at least a specified amount; in 2017, the minimum benefit was $16 a month. This proposal would have ended SNAP benefits for nearly 2 million people, many of them in elderly households with incomes close to the poverty line (Dean 2017).

Strikingly, the first Trump administration budget also would have required states to pay 25 percent of SNAP benefit costs (Dean 2017). For over half a century, the federal government has paid the full cost of SNAP benefits. This proposal would have shifted billions of dollars in annual costs to the states at the same time that Trump administration budgets also sought to scale back federal grants to states in various other areas as part of substantial reductions for many NDD programs (as outlined further below).

Of note, the proposal to require states to pay 25 percent of SNAP benefit costs would have permitted states to reduce SNAP benefit levels—which a number of states likely would have considered given the fiscal burdens they otherwise would face. To fully maintain SNAP benefit levels, for example, Pennsylvania would have needed to find state dollars that totaled more than twice what the state was then providing per year for community colleges, one analysis found (Dean 2017). In subsequent budgets, the administration replaced this proposal with a proposal to cut federal SNAP benefit levels substantially and substitute boxes of various food items⁴ (Dean 2018; Rosenbaum, Dean, Bolen, Wolkomir, Keith-Jennings, Cai and Nchako 2018).

A final area of proposed SNAP cuts would have targeted those aged 18–49 who are not raising children at home and are not considered disabled or incapacitated. Under the law governing SNAP, these individuals can receive SNAP benefits for only three months in which they are employed for less than 20 hours a week or unemployed out of every three years—unless their state or local area has secured a temporary exemption from the three-month time limit due to elevated unemployment. The early Trump administration budgets would have made the criteria that states and localities must meet for such an exemption considerably more restrictive by requiring that the state or local unemployment rate be at least 10 percent. When Congress did not pass that proposal, the administration issued a rule to limit the areas that could qualify for an exemption to those with either (1) an average unemployment rate that both exceeded 6 percent and was at least 20 percent higher than the national unemployment rate over the previous 24 months, or (2) an average unemployment rate of more than 10 percent over the previous 12 months (Stone 2019). Under such a rule, during a prolonged recession in which the national unemployment rate averaged 7 percent over two years, an area with an average unemployment rate of 8 percent would not have qualified. A federal court, however, struck down the rule (Bolen 2020).

Trump administration budgets also sought less sizable reductions in other food and nutrition programs. The final budget (for fiscal year 2021), for example, proposed to trim eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals and reduce child nutrition programs overall by $1.7 billion over 10 years (Rosenbaum and Neuberger 2020).

Medicaid/ACA

Trump administration proposals regarding health insurance focused on repealing the ACA, which included a Medicaid expansion that extended coverage to people below 133 percent of the poverty line who are not elderly, disabled, or raising children and which also included new subsidies to make private health coverage more affordable for families and individuals between 100 and 400 percent of the poverty line (Park 2017a). Trump proposals also called for federal funding caps on Medicaid, with the caps set so that federal funding for state Medicaid programs would rise each year at a rate slower than increases in health care costs, likely prompting some states to compensate for the lost federal revenues by scaling back their Medicaid programs over time.

The Trump administration also implemented administrative changes that reduced access to health coverage, such as cutting in half the time allowed each fall for people to sign up for coverage for the coming year through the ACA’s health insurance marketplaces (Lueck 2017; Aron-Dine 2019). After six consecutive years (2011 through 2016) in which the percentage of Americans who are uninsured fell each year, the uninsured rate climbed in 2017, 2018, and 2019; 2.3 million more people were uninsured in 2019 than in 2016, including 700,000 more children (Broaddus 2020).

As noted, ACA repeal efforts fell short in 2017. The second Trump administration budget, released in early 2018, then proposed reductions in Medicaid and ACA marketplace subsidies totaling $763 billion over 10 years compared to the budget baseline (Parrott, Aron-Dine, Rosenbaum, Rice, Floyd and Romig 2018). Specifically, the budget proposed to replace the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and marketplace subsidies with a block grant to states and to put the rest of Medicaid under a federal “per capita cap,” under which the federal government would reimburse state Medicaid programs on a per capita (i.e., per enrollee) basis. Both the block grant funding levels and per-capita-cap levels would rise each year by less than the rate of increase in health care costs, resulting in growing funding reductions over time compared to the budget baseline and likely inducing states to limit Medicaid and the other health coverage programs the block grant would support (Parrott, Aron-Dine, Rosenbaum, Rice, Floyd, and Romig 2018). Subsequent Trump administration budgets included similar proposals. The final Trump administration budget would have cut more than $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid and ACA programs (Kogan, Romig and Beltran 2020; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig and Floyd 2019; Katch 2019).

Some Trump administration budgets also proposed other changes in health care programs, including a reduction in the federal funding matching rate for states for CHIP in the first Trump administration budget (Park 2017b).

Housing and rental assistance

Trump administration budgets also proposed sizeable reductions in programs for rental assistance and for increasing the supply of housing affordable for lower-income households. For example, all four budgets proposed significant increases in the rents that low-income households must pay if they are using federal rental vouchers or living in public housing.

The first Trump administration budget would have raised rents on up to 4 million low-income households by an average of $84 a month (over $1,000 a year). The budget would have done so by: (1) authorizing the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to raise rents for people using rental vouchers or living in public housing from 30 percent of net household income—after deductions for high medical or child care costs and certain other expenses—to 35 percent of gross income; (2) ending assistance that helps some of the lowest-income of these households pay utility bills; and 3) charging a minimum rent of $50 a month (which some but not all localities already did) whether or not that would exceed 35 percent of a household’s income. Nearly 90 percent of the proposed rent increases would have fallen on low-income working households or households with one or more elderly or disabled members. The poorest households would have been particularly affected: rents for households with annual incomes of less than $2,500 would have risen an average of $52 a month (an average increase of 125 percent; Fischer, Sard, and Mazzara 2017; Sard 2017).

The final three Trump administration budgets modified that proposal. The rent increase from 30 percent of net income to 35 percent of gross income would have applied to households with one or more non-disabled members between the ages of 18 and 65. HUD also would be authorized to raise minimum rents to $150 a month for households without an elderly or disabled member and $50 a month for elderly and disabled households (again, whether or not that rent would exceed 35 percent of a household’s income; CBPP 2018). An increase to $150 in the minimum rent would have at least tripled the rental charge for some of the poorest tenants, and while rental assistance programs contain certain hardship exemptions, those exemptions can be hard to use and not many households secure them.⁵ These proposals would have caused rents to rise an average of more than 40 percent for about 4 million households, CBPP analysts estimated (Fischer 2018; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd, and Parrott, 2019; Rice 2020).

Trump administration budgets also proposed reductions in funding (1) for rental vouchers, shrinking the number of low-income households receiving vouchers by about 140,000 to 250,000 (depending on which Trump administration budget one considers), (2) for operating and repairing public housing, and (3) for homelessness assistance (Rice 2017; Bailey 2017; Rice 2018; Rice 2019; Rice 2020).

Finally, all four Trump administration budgets proposed to eliminate three of the four HUD programs that provide funds to boost the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities—the HOME program, the Community Development Block Grant, and the Choice Neighborhoods initiative—and to cut the fourth program, the Native American Housing Block Grant (Rice 2017; Rice 2018; Rice 2019; Reich and Beltran 2020; OMB 2017; OMB 2018; OMB 2019; OMB 2020). The budgets also proposed to end the National Housing Trust Fund, which supports state and local efforts to expand the affordable housing supply and which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac funded through fees (Rice 2017; Rice 2018; Rice 2019; Rice 2020).

Cash assistance

Trump administration budgets sought reductions in the SSI program, which provides monthly cash assistance to low-income people who have disabilities or are elderly; in TANF, which provides states with block-grant funds they use in part to provide monthly cash aid to very poor families with children; and in SSDI, which provides disability benefits to those with a serious disability who have worked enough years to qualify for Social Security.

The four Trump administration budgets all called for reducing SSI benefits that a disabled child can receive when more than one member of a household receives SSI. Examining the first Trump administration budget, CBPP analysts reported that if a parent and one or more children received SSI, the first child’s benefit would have shrunk by 38 percent and a second child’s benefit by 47 percent, causing roughly 250,000 children to experience benefit losses (Romig and Herrera 2017). This proposal could have particularly affected families with children who share a genetic disorder that renders more than one child disabled (Parrott, Aron-Dine, Rosenbaum, Rice, Floyd and Romig 2018; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd, and Parrott 2019; Romig 2020b).

The four budgets also called for reducing federal TANF funding to states by more than $20 billion over 10 years, as well as ending the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), which provides flexible funds to states to provide various services to people in need. Together, the TANF and SSBG reductions would have totaled $38 billion to $39 billion over a decade (Shapiro, Kogan, and Cho 2017; Parrott, Aron-Dine, Rosenbaum, Rice, Flod, and Romig 2018; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd and Parrott 2019; Floyd 2020).

Trump administration budgets largely bypassed Social Security, but not entirely. Each of the budgets proposed to scale back benefits that some new enrollees receive from SSDI. For many individuals who become newly disabled, a period can elapse between the onset of their disability and when they begin drawing monthly SSDI benefits—when, for instance, someone plans to return to work after suffering serious injuries in a car accident but then finds that his or her disability is too severe and enduring for them to resume working. SSDI recognizes such situations by providing up to 12 months of retroactive benefits to newly approved beneficiaries to cover the time between the documented onset of their disability and the approval of their application for benefits. Trump administration budgets would have cut such retroactive benefits in half (Romig 2017a; Parrott, Aron-Dine, Rosenbaum, Rice, Floyd and Romig 2018; Golshan 2019; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd, and Parrott 2019; Romig 2020b). “This change,” CBPP wrote, “could mean the loss of thousands of dollars for workers who become disabled, try to return to work, and find they are unable to do so …. A beneficiary who would have qualified for 12 months of retroactive benefits would lose an average of about $7,000 in earned Social Security benefits” (Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd and Parrott 2019, 11).

As noted, President Trump signed a tax cut into law in 2017 that increased the CTC and thereby raised incomes for many working-poor families with children. The increase, however, was limited for those families. Although the legislation raised the full CTC amount from $1,000 to $2,000 per child through 2025, working-poor families generally secured only a small increase, if any, in their credit. That was because for low-income working families, the CTC under the 2017 law equaled 15 percent of earnings above $2,500 rather than, as under prior law, 15 percent of earnings above $3,000. That increased the CTC by $75 a year or less for 10 million children in the poorest families (Huang 2017), such as children in single-parent families in which the parent works full-time, year-round at the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage (a wage that has not risen since 2009) and earns about $15,000.

Non-defense discretionary programs

Trump administration budgets sought deep cuts in funding for NDD programs (i.e., those outside defense that policymakers fund each year through the appropriations process and that are not entitlements, other “mandatory” programs, or interest payments on the debt). NDD encompasses a wide array of programs, including job training, most education programs, veterans’ health care, federal courts and law enforcement, border security, air traffic control, national parks, scientific research, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, Social Security Administration operations (as opposed to the Social Security benefits that SSA pays), foreign aid, and much more.

NDD includes a substantial number of programs for people with low or modest incomes, such as the low-income housing programs described above, LIHEAP, the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Head Start, the Job Corps, part of the funding for Pell Grants, aid for elementary and secondary education in low-income areas, the Legal Services Corporation, and others.

The first Trump administration budget proposed overall NDD funding for fiscal year 2018 that would be 13 percent below the enacted 2017 level and 25 percent below the 2010 level in inflation-adjusted terms. Overall NDD funding for 2018 outside of the Departments of Veteran Affairs and Homeland Security would have been 17 percent below the inflation-adjusted 2017 level and 33 percent below the 2010 level (Reich 2017). NDD reductions then would have deepened further. By 2027, under the first Trump administration budget, total NDD funding would have been 41 percent below the 2017 level in inflation-adjusted terms (Reich 2017).

As a share of the economy (i.e., GDP), the reductions would have been steeper. In 2018, under the initial Trump administration budget, NDD funding would have shrunk to its lowest level as a share of GDP in six decades and, by 2027, to its lowest level since Herbert Hoover was president (Reich 2017). Subsequent Trump administration budgets featured similar proposals; by the tenth year (or earlier), they all would have reduced NDD funding as a share of GDP to its lowest levels since the Hoover years (Reich 2018; Van de Water, Friedman, and Parrott 2019; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd and Parrott 2019; Reich and Beltran 2020).

To reach these reduced levels, Trump administration budgets targeted numerous NDD programs for funding reductions, including various programs for lower-income households or communities. Along with the proposed reductions in housing programs, the budgets called for eliminating LIHEAP and the community service employment program (which connects low-income unemployed individuals 55 and over to part-time work); cutting a number of student aid programs (with the result that those programs would cover a smaller share of college costs over time); and, under the first Trump administration budget, slightly cutting Head Start (Cho 2017; Shapiro 2017; Parrott 2018; Mitchell 2018; Parrott, Aron-Dine, Rosenbaum, Rice, Floyd and Romig 2018; Kogan, Romig, and Beltran 2020). The final Trump administration budget also called for terminating the Legal Service Corporation (Reich and Beltran 2020).

Self-sufficiency

Some administration officials defended various proposals to reduce benefits for low-income households by calling on individuals in those households to go to work or work more (Badger 2017). Even so, all Trump administration budgets sought reductions in a number of programs that are designed to strengthen the ability of low-income individuals to secure and retain employment.

The first Trump administration budget proposed cutting core job training funds for states and localities by 40 percent; the final three budgets proposed shrinking the Job Corps by nearly a quarter or more; and all of the budgets proposed terminating the community service employment program (Bernstein 2017; Parrott 2017; Mitchell 2018; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd, and Parrott 2019; Kogan, Romig, and Beltran 2020; Romig 2020a; OMB 2017; OMB 2018; OMB 2019; OMB 2020). In addition, all four budgets sought to scale back student aid by proposing to reduce funding for work-study programs by about half, make student loans more expensive for many, freeze Pell Grant levels (by not extending a provision that adjusted them for inflation), and eliminate Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, which supplement Pell Grants for some of the neediest students (Parrott 2017; Shapiro 2017; Mitchell 2018; Kogan, Katch, Rosenbaum, Rice, Romig, Floyd, and Parrott 2019;Reich and Beltran 2020). Such changes would make college education more difficult for some students from low- and moderate-income families to afford.

At the same time, the administration proposed in at least one budget to increase funding for apprenticeship programs, from $95 million in 2017 to $200 million in 2019, and to raise funding for reemployment services and eligibility assessments for certain unemployment insurance beneficiaries by $15 million (Mitchell 2018). Those increases, however, represented a small fraction of the reductions proposed in other programs to boost job readiness and employment.