President Donald Trump is calling for slashing social safety net programs like food stamps and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in a $4.8 trillion election year budget proposal.
The White House is also proposing to slash foreign aid, a perennial target for proposed cuts, after the president has spent years blasting U.S. overseas funding as wasteful.
Homeland Security programs would get a boost, the Pentagon would get flat funding after enjoying big increases in prior years, and NASA would get a $3 billion increase as it plans for a trip to Mars.
The White House is releasing President Trump’s $4.8 trillion election year budget proposal, which slashes funding for social safety net programs
Food stamps would shed $181 billion over the next ten years, while proposed changes to hospital reimbursements and other programs would trim hundreds of billions out of Medicare – if they became law.
The social safety net cuts would total $292 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The social program cuts are part of an effort to balance the budget in 15 years – although Congress has rejected them in the past and they stand little chance of making it through the Democratic-controlled House.
”For decades, Washington elites told us that Americans had no choice but to accept stagnation, decay, and decline. We proved them wrong. Our economy is strong once more,’ Trump said in a statement accompanying the budget.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said night that ‘once again the president is showing just how little he values the good health, financial security and well-being of hard-working American families.’
In this Jan. 31, 2019, file photo, hundreds of people overflow onto the sidewalk in a line snaking around the block outside a U.S. immigration office with numerous courtrooms in San Francisco
In this Aug. 13, 2019, photo, Dr. Jasmine Saavedra, left, a pediatrician at Esperanza Health Centers in Chicago, hands newborn Alondra Marquez to her mother, Esthela Nuñez, right, after examination. The budget proposes cuts in a variety of social programs
President Donald Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2021 arrives at the House Budget Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Feb. 10, 2020
Trump’s budget follows a familiar formula that exempts seniors from cuts to Medicare and Social Security while targeting benefit safety net programs for the poor, domestic programs like clean energy and student loan subsidies. It again proposes to dramatically slash funding for overseas military operations to save $567 billion over 10 years but adds $1.5 trillion over the same time frame to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent law.
Trump’s budget would also shred last year’s hard-won budget deal between the White House and Pelosi by imposing an immediate 5% cut to non-defense agency budgets passed by Congress. Slashing cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and taking $700 billion out of Medicaid over a decade are also nonstarters on Capitol Hill, but both the White House and Democrats are hopeful of progress this spring on prescription drug prices.
To help show the budget coming into balance, the budge envisions long-term 3 per cent growth and more immediate 2.8 per cent growth – even though growth was 2.1 per cent last year.
The president also will request billions of dollars to complete a wall at the US-Mexico border.
The budget plan will request $2billion to complete the controversial wall along the southern US border that Trump has demanded since his 2016 campaign to stop migrants from entering the country.
The proposal will also substantially boost funding for NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security.
However, it’s not likely that the budget plan, which is designed to reduce the country’s spending by $4.4trillion and deficits by $4.6trillion over the next decade, will pass in the Democrat-controlled House.
The plan sheds light on Trump’s fiscal priorities as he seeks re-election this year.
President Donald Trump announced a $4.8trillion budget proposal on Sunday that will slash spending on foreign aid and social safety nets but will request millions of dollars to complete a wall at the US-Mexico border. Trump pictured Friday
This graph shows the sectors where Trump will boost and cut funds in his $4.89trillion budget plan. The biggest post will be in defense, while cuts will be made in social security, medicaid and medicare
The plan seeks to fulfill Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to construct a wall along the southern US border, which has sparked controversy in Congress and triggered a historic five-week government shutdown last winter when lawmakers refused to fund the project.
The $2billion request is significantly less than the $5billion that Trump’s administration asked for last year.
The budget plan also focuses on military spending, boosting it by 0.3% to $740.5billion for fiscal year 2021, starting on October 1, a senior administration official confirmed to the Wall Street Journal.
The proposal includes shifting resources away from the Air Force to some of President Trump’s new priorities, including the recently created Space Force, Bloomberg News reported.
NASA will see the biggest boost with as much as a 12% increase to fulfill Trump’s goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024.
The budget plan will request $2billion to complete the controversial wall along the southern US border that Trump has demanded since his 2016 campaign to stop migrants from illegally entering the country. The border wall pictured in Campo, California
Trump’s budget will bolster NASA spending from about $22.6billion to $25.2billion in fiscal 2021 – one of the biggest spending jumps requested since the 1990s.
Overall the White House will cut reduce spending on food stamps and federal disability benefits and will modify Medicare prescription-drug pricing that could lead to $130billion in savings – something the president touched on in his State of the Union Address last week.
‘Working together, the Congress can reduce drug prices substantially from current levels,’ Trump said.
‘I have been speaking to Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and others in the Congress in order to get something on drug pricing done, and done properly. I am calling for bipartisan legislation that achieves the goal of dramatically lowering prescription drug prices. Get a bill to my desk, and I will sign it into law without delay,’ he said.
NASA will see the biggest boost with as much as a 12% increase to fulfill Trump’s goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024. Trump’s budget will bolster NASA spending from about $22.6billion to $25.2billion in fiscal 2021 – one of the biggest spending jumps requested since the 1990s
Another major focus of Trump’s budget is to reduce foreign aid by 21% as the president continues to push for countries to pay their ‘fair share’ for their own defense.
Trump came under fire for temporarily suspending aid to Ukraine last year, a move which triggered impeachment proceedings over abuse of power.
Republicans defended the move claiming the president was seeking to suspend or reduce US financial spending overseas, particularly to corrupt countries.
The budget plans to cut 26% or funding for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), continuing Trump’s efforts to roll back Obama-era EPA regulations.
Overall social saftey nets will see $292billion in cuts impacting work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps.
In Trump’s State of the Union Address he boasted about the strength of the economy saying: ‘We are moving forward at a pace that was unimaginable just a short time ago and we are never going back.’
Under Trump’s plan, the federal budget deficit would shrink to $966billion next year from an estimated $1trillion in 2020 – more than twice what Trump projected in his first budget proposal in 2017.