WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to propose a reorganization of the federal government as early as Thursday that would shuffle key community development, housing and food programs to new departments, where they could be easier to cut or contain, according to administration officials briefed on the proposal.
The plan, which will most likely face significant opposition in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans, includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the Department of Health and Human Services and probably include the word “welfare” in its title.
At the heart of the plan is an attempt to shift SNAP, which serves more than 42 million poor and working-class Americans, to the new agency from the Agriculture Department. Conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and Koch-related entities, have long sought to de-link food aid from agriculture in hopes of cutting costs.
Senate Republicans, who have already rejected a more modest Trump administration attempt to increase work requirements for SNAP recipients, are unlikely to sign off on the proposed shift, which was first reported by Politico.
As recently as earlier this month, Mr. Mulvaney was also considering merging the Labor and Education Departments, either in the new welfare agency or in a new stand-alone department, according to a person with knowledge of his plans.
Mr. Mulvaney’s proposal is, in part, a back-to-the-future bureaucratic move. From 1953 to 1979, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare housed most of the nation’s social welfare and economic support programs. It was abolished by Congress under President Jimmy Carter, and split into the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, in recognition that no single department could manage all of the old department’s functions.
Another proposal included in a draft circulated to officials last week is an attempt to move the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant Program to the Department of Commerce from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, an official said.
This year, Mr. Mulvaney zeroed out funding for the grant program, which provides a broad and flexible funding pool for an array of community development, only to have Senate Republicans restore the cuts.
An adviser to a senior Senate Republican said the move to the Commerce Department was an attempt to strangle the program by removing it from career HUD officials who were more sympathetic to the demands of impoverished communities than Commerce Department officials.
Administration officials said the blueprint for the plan was a 2017 list of reorganization recommendations produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The group’s wish list includes the elimination of a handful of well-known federal programs, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Export-Import Bank. It was not clear if Mr. Mulvaney had adopted those suggestions. But he is expected to propose far-reaching overhauls to the consumer bureau, which he runs as a second job.
