In case you missed it, President Obama's final budget not only includes a $3.4 trillion tax increase to pay for frivolous social justice programs, it significantly cuts counterterrorism programs across the country. By significantly, we're talking a nearly 50 percent cut, New York City included.
Democrat Chuck Schumer, who serves as a Senator for New York, is up in arms about the cuts.
Sen. Charles Schumer is slamming a White House proposal that would reduce funding for counterterrorism programs across the country by nearly $300 million.
The New York Democrat is pushing President Barack Obama to reconsider the cuts.
Schumer notes that the cuts to the Urban Area Security Initiative were included in the proposed 2017 budget released last week by the White House. The initiative helps fund programs in cities across the U.S. to prevent extremist attacks, or respond to and recover from them.The proposed budget would cut the funding from $600 million to $330 million.
"These proposed cuts are ill-advised and ill-timed and they must be reversed. End of story," Schumer said in a statement to The Associated Press. "In light of recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and the vow by our extremist enemies to launch more attacks on our shores, it makes no sense to propose cuts to vital terror-prevention programs like UASI."
Schumer, who decried the cuts at a news conference on Sunday, said the program is necessary to adequately fund counterterrorism programs in high-density urban areas like New York City.
"New York City remains terror target number one and the NYPD relies on these programs to keep us safe," he said.
Keep in mind Obama's proposed cuts come at a time when the terrorism threat against the United States is at its highest level since 9/11. Just last week, both the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency warned during congressional testimony that an attack from ISIS inside the United States in inevitable this year.
ISIS "will probably attempt to conduct additional attacks in Europe, and attempt to direct attacks on the U.S. homeland in 2016," Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was also at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, estimated that violent extremists were active in about 40 countries and that there currently exist more terrorist safe havens "than at any time in history."
Clapper warned that ISIS and its eight branches were the No. 1 terrorist threat, and that it was using the refugee exodus from violence in Iraq and Syria to hide among innocent civilians in order to reach other countries.
The good news is Obama's budget is highly unlikely to pass. His previous budgets have been defeated unanimously, with the exception of one, which received a single vote.
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