House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) last week released the House Republicans first round of proposed budget cuts, laying out about $32 billion in overall cuts, but without naming any specific program reductions. Ryan has been justifying his refusal to name a specific program that he’d cut from the budget by punting to the Appropriations Committee. “[Naming specifics] is what is gonna happen in the appropriations process down the road. So I can’t tell you the answer to that because, as a budget committee person, we simply lower the cap and then those things go down,” Ryan said.

Today, the Appropriations Committee — chaired by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) — released the specific cuts that House Republicans are proposing to get below Ryan’s cap. Of course, the cuts consist of reductions to common GOP bogeymen like the National Endowment for the Arts and Amtrak. But the House Republicans have a preoccupation with cutting programs that affect women and their babies. For instance, the GOP proposed:

– Cutting $758 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which amounts to about a 6 percent cut to a program providing food assistance to low-income women and their infants.

– Cutting $210 million from Maternal and Child Health Block Grants, which amounts to about a 33 percent cut in a program giving low-income pregnant women, mothers and their children access to health care.

– Cutting $27 million from the Poison Control Center, which would essentially eliminate a program supporting local poison control centers and funding a hotline directing residents to their local poison control office. Poisoning disproportionately affects children, with half the exposures at the National Poison Control Center last year occurring to children younger than six.

The House Republicans second-largest cut is to community health centers ($1.1 billion). In 2008, about one-third of community health center patients were children.

In the grand scheme of deficit reduction, these cuts will do absolutely nothing, but they will have extremely detrimental effects for those who depend upon the targeted programs. This shows the folly of the GOP’s approach to budgeting, which leaves huge parts of the federal budget immune to cuts (like the Pentagon), while taking an axe to non-defense discretionary spending. These cuts outlined above total about $1 billion, while simply retiring (and not replacing) one carrier battle group and its aircraft wing would save $1.5 billion.

“Make no mistake, these cuts are not low-hanging fruit,” Rogers said in the statement. “These cuts are real and will impact every District across the country — including my own.” While they may impact every district, they certainly don’t spread the pain equally.

House Republicans rode into the majority in Congress’ lower chamber with plenty of promises to aid job creation. However, their initial legislative efforts have focused on everything but jobs: they passed a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, are spending time attempting to restrict abortions and redefine rape, and have introduced plenty of job-destroying spending cut proposals.

Yesterday, though, House Republicans looked for a moment like they would actually do something to help the jobless. The Trade Assistance Adjustment Program — which helps retrain workers who have lost their jobs due to trade — is going to expire on Saturday. House Republicans brought an extension of the program up for vote, since it has the backing of House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI), but promptly pulled it in the face of a conservative backlash:

The extension hadn’t drawn significant controversy on Capitol Hill. The Republican chairman, Rep. Dave Camp, and the top Democrat, Rep. Sander Levin, on the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee are both from Michigan, and House Speaker John Boehner hails from hard-hit Ohio. The House was expected to pass an extension Tuesday afternoon, but GOP leaders pulled the measure from the floor, reportedly because of a dispute over whether the government was getting too involved in the economy.

The Hill reported today that pulling the bill may be “an effort to pressure the administration on the Colombia and Panama free trade agreements.” In fact, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has said that “he will block TAA until the White House vows to move the free trade agreement with Colombia.” The TAA program is also opposed by the Wall Street backed Club for Growth, which said that “our country can neither afford this program, nor should the government be in the business of providing such a benefit.”

But TAA has helped tens of thousands of workers who have lost their jobs due to the globalization of trade, through no fault of their own. According to Policy Matters Ohio, the Buckeye state alone had “208 groups with 26,427 workers certified for TAA,” from a variety of industries, including automakers and steelworkers.

U.S. job training programs clearly need to be retooled to better reflect the needs of a 21st century workforce and economy, as I discussed here. But that’s no reason to discard them completely, or to make reauthorizing them a condition of uncritically approving further job-sucking trade deals.