U.S. Travel Association condemns Trump plans for Brand USA

The Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate the Brand USA tourism marketing agency in its most recent budget has been greeted with condemnation by the U.S. Travel Association.

Roger Dow, the Association’s president and CEO, said that the decision made little sense, given the prior support of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Mick Mulvaney.

“The creation of Brand USA was a bipartisan effort led by Republicans that passed both chambers by overwhelming majorities,” Dow said in a statement. “The agency was responsible for adding $8.9 billion to the U.S. economy last year, according to the firm Oxford Economics – a 28-to-1 return on investment.”

USA Today reports that Trump’s budget seeks to cut funding for the program and divert the revenue to Customs and Border Protection – with the deficit set to rise by $510 million over the next three years as a result. The budget proposals still face approval by Congress, and will be debated over the coming months.

Brand USA was established by the Travel Promotion Act as the United States’ first public-private partnership with the aim of marketing the country as a premier travel destination and communicating U.S. entry policies. It commenced operations in 2011, and studies by Oxford Economics indicate that its marketing efforts have helped contribute to more than three million incremental international visitors to the USA – supporting an average of nearly 50,000 incremental jobs a year.

Dow also said that eliminating Brand USA, far from improving economic conditions in the country, would serve to worsen them. “Brand USA isn’t funded with a dime of taxpayer money, reduced the deficit by $50 million, and by the OMB’s own accounting eliminating it would put the federal budget further in the red,” he commented.

“With international visitation being the country’s No. 2 export supporting 15 million American jobs, we’re struggling to understand how cutting Brand USA squares with this administration’s stated priorities.”

The Trump administration’s proposals mark further worrying news for the tourism industry in the United States: they come just days after the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) forecast a loss of over $1.3 billion in overall travel-related expenditures in the country in 2017 as a result of global uncertainty and the anti-travel policies put forward by the new government.