US President Donald Trump’s administration yesterday proposed a $163 billion cut to the federal budget that would sharply reduce spending on education, housing and medical research next year, while increasing outlays for defence and border security.
The administration said the proposed budget would raise homeland security spending by nearly 65 per cent from 2025 enacted levels, as Trump cracks down on illegal immigration.
Non-defence discretionary spending, which excludes the massive Social Security and Medicare programmes and rising interest payments on the nation’s debt, would be cut by 23pc to the lowest level since 2017, the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.
The proposal would cleave more than $2bn from the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service and would slice the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention by more than 40pc.
Trump’s first budget since reclaiming office seeks to make good on his promises to boost spending on border security while slashing the federal bureaucracy. Congressional Democrats blasted the domestic spending cuts as too severe, and some Republicans called for boosting spending on defence and other areas.
“At this critical moment, we need a historic budget – one that ends the funding of our decline, puts Americans first, and delivers unprecedented support to our military and homeland security,” OMB director Russ Vought said in the statement.
Vought, while at the Heritage Foundation, was an architect of Project 2025, a roadmap for scaling back the reach of the federal government. Trump disavowed that effort during the campaign but once in office, he made Vought his budget czar.
The federal government has a growing $36 trillion debt pile, and some fiscal conservatives and budget experts worry Trump’s proposal to extend his 2017 tax cuts will add to it.
The so-called skinny budget is an outline of administration priorities that will give Republican appropriators in Congress a blueprint to begin crafting spending bills.
Republican US Senator Susan Collins, the chamber’s top appropriator, reacted coolly.
“This request has come to Congress late, and key details still remain outstanding. Based on my initial review, however, I have serious objections,” Collins, of Maine, said. She cited concerns that defence spending was too.
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