Last year, President Trump tried to eliminate a wide range of programs with an outsized impact in Maine, including Sea Grant, low income heating assistance, community block grants, the National Estuarine Reserve system, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Legal Services Corporation, a major funding source for Pine Tree Legal Assistance. Congress ultimately told him to pound sand.
Yesterday, his new budget proposes again to eliminate these and other programs. As I report in today’s Portland Press Herald, Maine’s Congressional delegation — from conservative Republican Bruce Poliquin to liberal democrat Chellie Pingree and more centrist US Senators in between — is not on board.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.