Letters to the Editor: Trump is setting us back in categories far beyond military technology

To the editor: Contributing writer Jon Duffy’s headline applies to so many other areas besides reverting to old technologies for aircraft carrier launches (“Trump is spending billions to reverse American progress,” Aug. 31).

Examine the federal budget and policies. The same headline can be applied to President Trump spending money on programs in environmental destruction, lawlessness in justice and rewriting history. It can apply to the spurning of allies and diplomatic collaboration and initiating and fighting spurious wars. Then there’s the defunding of health programs and spreading confusion about vaccines.

There are countless other examples: slashing federal aid to education, legalizing discrimination, exploding the national debt, promoting fossil fuels at the expense of green energy, defanging civil and human rights laws, undermining gun control laws, increasing the power of billionaires and corporations to buy elections and establishing limits on voting. The weakening of Congress and the curtailing of the power of lower courts, the building of personal monuments and the destruction of others and the cuts to scientific research grants are all further examples of how our tax dollars are at work reversing American programs that we have fought so long and hard to establish.

Duffy’s description barely represents the “tip of the iceberg,” as most recently exposed by the melting of a glacier in Nepal, while the Trump administration denies climate change.

Joel Pelcyger, Los Angeles