No Science Zone

[JohnN]

Trump donates first quarter salary to National Park Service

That's pretty cool. Politicians like to talk about everyone chipping in but rarely do themselves.

Gee, the Donald proposed cutting $1.5 B from the Department of Interior. That donation is just a (very small) PR figleaf.

 

[RyanT]

@JohnN beat me to it, total PR stunt.

 

[ScubaWithTurk]

Gee, the Donald proposed cutting $1.5 B from the Department of Interior. That donation is just a (very small) PR figleaf.

I see it as less of a PR fig leaf and more a man sticking to a promise he made on the campaign trail. He stated he would donate every cent of his salary. This is the first installment and I look forward to seeing where else he decides to donate his pay.

***Note- this does not mean I back Trump (although as a veteran I do hope POTUS succeeds) nor does it mean I am anti-Trump, it only means I like that he is sticking to a promise he made that many probably already forgot he made***

 

[RyanT]

I can certainly appreciate Trump donating his salary. However, his donation to the NPS was around 78K. So after his donation, the NPS will just receive a $1.4992B cut. If he truly valued the NPS, he wouldn't be proposing a $1.5 B cut. Of course $1.5B sounds like a lot, but let's put it in perspective. We spend $600B annually on our military. So the cuts that are being proposed to the National Institutes of Health, plus the National Park Service amount to 1.3% of the military's budget. I agree we need a strong military, but the proposed cuts will really hurt NIH and NPS, but would barely make a dent in our military budget. Trump's proposed cuts just aren't going to balance the budget.

 

[JohnN]

I see it as less of a PR fig leaf and more a man sticking to a promise he made on the campaign trail. He stated he would donate every cent of his salary. This is the first installment and I look forward to seeing where else he decides to donate his pay.

***Note- this does not mean I back Trump (although as a veteran I do hope POTUS succeeds) nor does it mean I am anti-Trump, it only means I like that he is sticking to a promise he made that many probably already forgot he made***

Didn't the Donald also make a campaign promise to release his tax returns?

 

[ScubaWithTurk]

Didn't the Donald also make a campaign promise to release his tax returns?

I am not here to defend POTUS. As I stated, the post was not me raising the Trump banner just stating that this was not a PR move. A PR move is one you make specifically for the press that is usually dictated by some sort of negative press.

This was just him keeping this specific promise. As to what other promises he will keep and won't keep, I will not speculate.

Now to answer your question (which is of course rhetorical) yes he did promise to release them.

 

[Gr8WyattWhale]

Funding = money taken from tax payers

So basically his actions show he doesn't think you and I should have to pay so much money to a bloated inept inefficient government (I agree) but he thinks the park service is a worthwhile organization, so he ponied up his own dough.
I can respect that.

Who here has ever donated their salary, or at least the majority of their salary to any organization? Show of hands?
Which Democrat president has donated their salary to any organization?

I don't particularly like Trump being the POTUS, but at the very least, saying Republicans are anti environment is extremely ideological and quite silly.

Everything a pres. does is PR in one way or another.

 

[covediver]

I worked on a project using publicly available data that justified a major offshore leasing in the US Arctic two years ago approved by the Obama Administration. One year laterm the Administration used the same science to put most of the Arctic off limits. Politics changed in the intervening years, not the science. Before you make these statements, please take an introductory am gov/pubic policy course.

 

[Georgienne Bradley]

@drrich2 you might want to check out this article published last week at Princeton University: Science Under Attack
or perhaps this read by the Union of Concerned Scientists: Counting the Attacks on Science by the Trump Administration and Congress

 

[Georgienne Bradley]

Funding = money taken from tax payers