Touring the Boys & Girls Club building on Bradley Street in Concord, U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster stopped on the lower level – amid the foosball and billiards tables – to ask a young girl how she was doing.
Kuster, a Democrat who grew up in Concord, was struck by the girl’s response – not good, but “phenomenal.”
Reflecting on the exchange minutes later, Kuster said she couldn’t help considering a scenario without an accessible after-school program “if that little girl was home this afternoon alone, with nobody.”
For after-school programs like the ones offered by the Boys & Girls Club, federal funding administered through 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants would be eliminated altogether under President Donald Trump’s proposed budget. In Concord, those grants benefited six programs last year that served upward of 1,400 students.
Kuster spoke Monday to nonprofit officials representing after-school programs, food programs and mental health programs and decried the cuts proposed in the president’s budget, especially the ones targeting those fields, as “so dramatic and so Draconian.”
Kuster said she feels confident that at least some of the cuts will be restored through a bipartisan rejection of the president’s budget in Congress.
“We definitely have support among Republicans in both the House and the Senate for many of the community programs that have a long, successful track record of working and being effective,” she said. “That’s what I’m counting on – that we’ll work with our colleagues across the aisle and make the case to try to get their support to restore funding.”
Speaking to representatives of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Concord, the New Hampshire Food Bank, Riverbend Community Mental Health and the local school district, Kuster said she’s hoping that the final budget will look closer to the continuing resolution that is currently funding the government through September than the president’s proposal, which over the next decade would trim hundreds of billions of dollars from health, welfare and nutritional programs.
The “Democratic perspective” on programs like the after-school grants, she said, is that “we don’t want any changes to the budget.”
“If we can’t have a thoughtful conversation about where we need more and how to fix it, then at a minimum, continue where we’re going,” she said.
But with Democrats comprising the minority in both chambers, she said, she recognizes that a restoration may be “not everything across the board.”
“But certainly, judging based upon that continuing resolution, the budget for 2017, most of the proposed cuts have been restored, and I expect that will happen going forward,” she said.
Kuster said she expects that the House will vote on a budget within the next two months.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)
(Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that when Kuster said she didn’t want any changes to the budget, she was referring to areas such as after-school programs, food programs and mental health programs.)