WASHINGTON, D.C.—We've had a little fun watching The Hill, a venerable Capitol Hill tipsheet, turn into clickbait for the new regime. But there was a story there on Thursday that was not funny in the least. The incoming administration is preparing to pretty much blow up every part of the federal government that it doesn't like.

The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely. Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump's team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years. The proposed cuts hew closely to a blueprint published last year by the conservative Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has helped staff the Trump transition.

We warned a few months ago that, even more than this is Paul Ryan's dreamscape come to life, it's Jim DeMint's, who set Heritage on this destructive path years ago and was just waiting for the right moment to revoke every progressive idea since Teddy Roosevelt.

Two members of Trump's transition team are discussing the cuts at the White House budget office: Russ Vought, a former aide to Vice President-elect Mike Pence and the former executive director of the RSC, and John Gray, who previously worked for Pence, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) when Ryan headed the House Budget Committee. Vought and Gray, who both worked for the Heritage Foundation, are laying the groundwork for the so-called skinny budget — a 175- to 200-page document that will spell out the main priorities of the incoming Trump administration, along with summary tables. That document is expected to come out within 45 days of Trump taking office.

This could just be a trial balloon to soften up the Congress for less stringent, but still draconian, cuts later on. And the targeting of the two National Endowments, which make up a tiny percentage of the national budget, is pure culture war bullying in which the president*-elect will gleefully join because so many entertainers have said mean things about him.

Ralph Crane Getty Images

And remember Ryan Zinke, the nominee for Interior Secretary who called himself a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and who professed his allegiance to the "Gifford Pinchot" model for "multiple use" of our public lands? The oil industry sees him as a bit of a ray of light. From Petroleum World:

The former Navy SEAL sought to outline a measured approach to the job of managing America's national parks, forests and tribal lands during a four-hour Senate confirmation hearing that was mostly cordial, lacking some of the hot-tempered grilling that has marked other sessions to vet Trump's cabinet nominees. "Yes," he said in response to a question from Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska about whether he would review drilling curbs imposed by President Barack Obama's administration in her state, home to vast petroleum deposits both onshore and beneath Arctic waters. "I can guarantee you it is better to produce energy domestically under reasonable regulation than overseas with no regulation ... We need an economy."

So he's not going to sell off public lands—yet—just open them up to "multiple use" by the gentle souls of America's extraction industries. This, by the way, is something Gifford Pinchot wrote in 1910 on the subject of public lands and private profit and the place of the commons in our lives:

Now that the fight is passing into an acute stage it is easily seen that the special interests have used the period of public indifference to manoeuvre themselves into a position of exceeding strength. In the first place, the Constitutional position of property in the United States is stronger than in any other nation. In the second place, it is well understood that the influence of the corporations in our law-making bodies is usually excessive, not seldom to the point of defeating the will of the people steadily and with ease. In the third place, cases are not unknown in which the special interests, not satisfied with making the laws, have assumed also to interpret them, through that worst of evils in the body politic, an unjust judge.

There's more than a lot to lose.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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