1 week Ago By Rob Port
MINOT — Our nation is closing in on $37 trillion in debt, which represents almost 123% of our gross domestic product. That's a problem we have to fix, and spending cuts have to be part of the equation. Yet that immutable reality still doesn't justify the approach President Donald Trump's administration is taking to spending cuts.
Case in point, recently, the administration announced the cut of $20 million in grants that were headed to North Dakota infrastructure projects. Among the cuts was $7.1 million for a water intake project in Washburn, almost $8 million for a regional wastewater project in Lincoln, south of Bismarck, and nearly $2 million for a wastewater lagoon project in Fessenden.
These projects represent the boring but vital functions of government that most of us are oblivious to. We all want our waste to go away when we flush the toilet or rinse out the sink, and we take for granted that the waste is flowing through a system where it's handled appropriately. But doing that takes planning and, perhaps most important, funding.
The sort of funding the Trump administration just cut for North Dakota projects. What's galling is that, when called on to defend these cuts, the Trump administration called the BRIC program, from which these funds derived, "wasteful" and "political." "The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program.
It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters," read a statement from FEMA, which is now under the control of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Political? How in the world is a wastewater lagoon political? We could have a debate about whether this sort of funding should come through FEMA, or the federal government at all. You could argue that the funding should be provided locally, except that the city of Fessenden has 425 citizens, and local officials estimate that raising the funds from local taxpayers would mean a roughly $6,000 tax hike on every property owner in Wells County.
The state of North Dakota could step in and provide those funds, too, but there's an upper limit on our capacity to do that. Like Wells County, the state of North Dakota has a relatively tiny tax base. Replacing the federal funding that flows into our state with state tax dollars would be fiscally devastating.
Entering the current legislative session, roughly 30% of Gov. Kelly Armstrong's executive budget was the appropriation of federal dollars. Our liberal friends sometimes like to deride this state of affairs as evidence that North Dakota is a beggar state.
The truth is more complicated. We have a lot of resources — energy, agriculture, etc. — that are vital to the rest of the country.
Thus, it behooves federal taxpayers to fund infrastructure here, from roads to bridges to wastewater lagoons. Without those federal dollars, North Dakota couldn't function because we don't have the tax base to support our infrastructure. This is tough medicine for North Dakota's pro-Trump electorate.
The Trump administration is branding even valid infrastructure projects as "wasteful" and "political" and it's left our congressional delegation scrambling to balance the stupidity of that with the unavoidable reality that this is precisely what North Dakota voters cast their ballots for. Congresswoman Julie Fedorchak appeared on a recent episode of the Plain Talk podcast, and we asked her about the Trump administration's approach to these cuts. Her answer was all over the map.
She said she would "love" to talk about DOGE (special Trump adviser Elon Musk's government efficiency initiative), but then said DOGE doesn't work for her and that she won't defend their approach, before circling back to say that it's going to be a "really productive process." I think Fedorchak knows that DOGE is a mess, but can't come out and say that because Republicans who register even modest criticisms of Trump are, as a practical political matter, walking out onto a dangerous limb. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.
Trump critics spend a lot of time wondering what it will take to break through the MAGA miasma and convince voters that they've made a mistake. My answer? It's going to take some pain. Voters will need to be impacted in some meaningful ways.
The value of their retirement accounts will have to dwindle amid the trade war, or they'll have to get slammed with massive property tax hikes as local officials try to fill in the gaps on infrastructure spending. That's what it will take, and DOGE may well be delivering..
