Trump Budget Cuts: How Blacks, Latinos, Others Are Impacted By Proposal

President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2018 budget plan has come under fire shortly after its release Thursday for recommending cuts to foreign aid, welfare programs, environmental protection and even entire agencies. But some Americans may suffer from the changes in government expenditures more than others—namely, African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

For starters, the proposed budget draws down funding for government assistance programs, for which the black participation rate was 41.6 percent and the Hispanic participation rate was 36.4 percent, compared to 17.8 percent of Asian Americans and 13.2 percent of whites, as of 2012, according to a 2015 report from the Census Bureau. For example, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Woman, Infants and Children, or WIC, which provides aid for low-income women who are pregnant or caring for children under age five, saw a $200 million drop in funding from its 2017 level.

Read: Do Trump Budget Cuts Hurt The Poor? WIC Benefits, Food Stamps, Meals On Wheels In Jeopardy

The Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, which gives grants and offers consulting to minority-owned firms, would be eliminated under Trump’s budget, as administration officials said the initiative was “duplicative of other Federal, State, local, and private sector efforts that promote minority business entrepreneurship.” The move would especially harm black women, who have beat out all other demographics in terms of starting new businesses for much of the 21st century.

Read: Women In Business: One Female Tech Entrepreneur Explains How She Is Making It In A White Man's World

But by giving the Environmental Protection Agency the biggest cut—a 31 percent funding loss—Trump’s budget would also harm minority communities in an indirect and perhaps less noticeable way.

Much research has provided evidence of pollution’s relatively larger impact on minority, and especially African American, communities. More than two decades ago, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order mandating the creation of an interagency working group to help each federal bureau address the “disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies and activities on minority populations.”

Non-white Americans on average breathe 38 percent higher levels of air pollution compared to whites, according to a 2014 University of Minnesota study. The same study also found that had non-white people breathed the same average pollution levels of the air enjoyed by white Americans, 7,000 deaths could have been prevented.

"Both race and income matter, but race matters more than income," Julian Marshall, one of the study’s authors, told CityLab around the time the paper was published. "And that's a really important point, because when you start talking about differences by race people say, 'Oh, that's just income.'"

Black children are also twice as likely to have asthma as their white counterparts, while black adults are almost three times as likely to die from asthma as whites, according to a 2013 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The entanglement of race and environmental protection extends to water pollution as well. The issue may bring to mind the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, which, according to a February report by the state’s Civil Rights Commission was at least in part a result of “decades of structural and institutional discrimination and racism… quieting your voices and enabling the poisoning of your public water supply.”