Trump Wants to Raise Military Spending — but Cut Everything Else
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The White House will send preliminary allocations to agencies this week, the first step to finalizing its 2018 budget proposal.
By Shane Goldmacher, Sarah Ferris and Jennifer Scholtes | 02/26/17 11:10 PM EST
President Donald Trump is taking the first major step toward putting together a federal budget proposal, asking federal agencies to draft plans to hike military spending and cut back other domestic programs—while making no changes to major entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare.
One senior administration official said the plan would call for increases in spending on defense, homeland security, intelligence, the Department of Justice and law enforcement.
Trump will propose “dollar for dollar cuts” elsewhere, the official said.
The White House is expected to send its preliminary funding targets for 2018 to federal agencies Monday, the day before Trump addresses the nation on Tuesday night in a prime-time address in which he will lay out his policy priorities for the coming months.
The White House has signaled it is not afraid of deep cuts in discretionary programs. Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon said last week that one of top goals of the administration was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
In conversations with conservative lawmakers, Trump's team has been promising drastic reductions, from gutting the Environmental Protection Agency to eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities. One plan floated among Capitol Hill lawmakers would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years, in line with a blueprint from the Heritage Foundation.
In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, Trump pledged to oversee “one of the greatest military buildups in American history.”
“We will be substantially upgrading all of our military, all of our military, offensive, defensive, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “And hopefully we'll never have to use it, but nobody's going to mess with us, folks. Nobody.”
To fund such a buildup without expanding the federal deficit, Trump would likely have to slash deeply into other domestic programs, particularly if he leaves entitlement programs untouched as he promised on the campaign trail.
Office of Management and Budget spokesman John Czwartacki confirmed the budget would contain “only discretionary spending targets” but declined to release more details.
“It would be premature for us to comment - or anyone to report - on the specifics of this internal discussion before its publication,” he said. “The president and his cabinet are working collaboratively to create a budget that keeps the president's promises to secure the country and restore fiscal sanity to how we spend American taxpayers' money.”
He added that “tax proposals will be included in the full budget submission later in the year.”
Some details of the coming Trump plan were first reported by the New York Times, which reported that Trump plans to make cuts at the EPA, the State Department, and safety-net programs such as food stamps.
Agency heads will have an opportunity to respond to the White House draft and appeal before the administration sends its formal budget request to Congress.
The first outline of Trump’s budget will cover only the $1.2 trillion of discretionary federal spending, comprised of domestic and military programs, that Congress controls annually. While the so-called “budget passbacks” from the White House Office of Management and Budget to agencies are a typical first step in any administration’s formal process of crafting a budget, publicizing that guidance would be unprecedented.
