As the Trump administration continues to try to justify an immoral, unbalanced budget with a $2 trillion accounting error, more cabinet members are pitching real estate deals to sell off or privatize public assets.

Earlier this month, when she testified before the House Appropriations Committee, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao restated her position supporting selling off public assets to fund infrastructure. Her stance follows a desperate trend by the Trump administration to bolster a disastrous budget that is dead on arrival in Congress.

Secretary Elaine Chao said this about infrastructure funding:

The president is looking more towards using $200 billion in direct federal funding in infrastructure. Using that as seed money and selling off some public assets….

Just a few weeks ago, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke fired a shot across the bow by advocating that we privatize our National Park campgrounds, which would inevitably pass the buck in the form of higher fees onto users. Now, more cabinet members are fancying themselves Manhattan real estate developers, like their boss, and are looking to liquidate public assets to the special interests that brought them to power.

America’s infrastructure owners, the taxpayers, should be alarmed by this dangerous trend to sell off and privatize their assets – whether it’s road infrastructure, campgrounds, or public lands – because privatized assets don’t tend to come back into public hands.