Sweeping Trump proposal seeks to shrink government, merge agencies

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The Trump administration issued an ambitious proposal Thursday to shrink government and reorganize how services are delivered to citizens, a plan that touches on nearly every corner of American life, from pizza to postal delivery.

The proposal would merge the departments of Education and Labor into a new Department of Education and the Workforce. Safety net services and food aid would be consolidated into the newly named Department of Health and Public Welfare, and rural housing assistance, now at the Department of Agriculture, would shift to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Food safety programs, now overseen by the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, would be consolidated into a new Federal Food Safety Agency.

The proposal is the result of a yearlong effort by Mick Mulvaney, a small-government crusader who leads the White House Office of Management and Budget. He called the plan the biggest reorganization of government since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal.

“It’s been almost 100 years since anybody really reorganized the government at this type of scale. It’s been since FDR and his New Deal, where he changed the way the government worked,” Mulvaney said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. “We haven’t changed it very much since then, which means we’re almost 20 percent into the 21st century, but we’re still dealing a government that is from the early 20th century.”

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