A big fat freak-out over Donald Trump's 'skinny' budget.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: FUTURE

PRESIDENTIAL BUDGETS HAVE all the legal force of a letter to Santa--they're essentially the White House asking Congress for a pony. The "skinny" blueprint released by the Office of Management and Budget in March is the result of even less consultation and collaboration than usual with the legislators who hold actual budget-making power, which makes wish fulfillment even more unlikely.

Nevertheless, when President Donald Trump announced $54 billion in cuts to several federal agencies, the press immediately got to work on its own form of slash fiction, fetishizing the appropriations status quo and moaning over any possibility of budgetary restraint.

"Donald Trump Budget Slashes Funds for E.P.A. and State Department," declared The New York Times. Gizmodo: "Trump's Plan to Slash the NIH Budget Won't Just Hurt Scientists--It Will Hurt Everyone." Bloomberg: "Trump Would Slash Research in Cut to Health Budget." Daily Kos: "Trump would slash education budget...but pour $1.4 billion into privatization." Business Insider: "Trump's slash-and-burn budget could hit his own political base the hardest." The metaphor makers at The Washington Post preferred smashing to slashing: "Trump's budget takes a sledgehammer to the EPA."

In fact, most of Trump's budget cuts take the targeted agencies back to federal funding levels of the mid-'OOs--hardly a Hobbesian state of nature. And despite the apocalyptic rhetoric, they're largely sensible trims that Republicans have been jawing about for years without having the chutzpah to actually propose them.

Cuts to Health and Human Services, for instance, clock in at a 17.9 percent decrease from the levels established so far in 2017 by continuing budget resolution. Some of those savings come from reduced appropriations to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Scientists "brace for a lost generation in American research," reports The Atlantic. Never mind that funding for the type of research NIH produces already comes predominantly from non-federal sources. In the mid-1960s, the federal government footed the bill for about 60 percent of R&D. That number has since flipped, with about two-thirds coming from private sources for the last decade. The cuts, described in the Atlantic article as having "deadly" consequences, will take the federal component of NIH funding down to levels not seen since...2003.

You remember 2003, when pain treatment consisted of willow bark tea and natural philosophers were still trying to figure...