Pentagon grows, state dept shrinks in US Budget

President Donald Trump will send proposal to Congress on Thursday

President Donald Trump will send a Budget to Congress on Thursday that sharply reorders the nation’s priorities by spending billions of dollars on defending the southern border and bolstering the Pentagon while severely cutting funds for foreign aid, poverty programs and the environment.

The Budget would fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to shock Washington by slashing the government work force — but it is virtually ensured to be discarded by Hill Republicans who see many of Trump’s cuts as too rushed, indiscriminate and reckless.

“You can’t drain the swamp and leave all of the people in it,” Mick Mulvaney, the White House’s Budget director, said during a briefing on Wednesday.

The Budget would cut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by 31 per cent, the State Department by 28 percent and Health and Human Services by 17.9 per cent. Funding to several smaller government agencies that have long been targets of conservatives — like the Legal Services Corporation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts — would be axed entirely.

The chances of Trump’s first budget passing Congress in its current form are slim. Many of the proposals would be nonstarters for Democrats, and some would be problematic for Republicans. The proposed $54 billion increase in military spending — a 10 per cent increase — would also require a repeal of spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act; Democrats oppose such a move without equal spending increases for domestic programs.

The most significant cuts would be at the EPA, which the Trump administration has accused of overreach. The president wants to trim $2.6 billion from the agency’s budget, in part by cutting about 3,200 positions, about a fifth of the department’s work force. If enacted, the proposal would cut the agency’s Budget to its lowest level in 40 years, adjusted for inflation. That would mean eliminating funding for climate change research, closing state environmental programs and ending regional projects like the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which has bipartisan support.

Trump would also cut funding to the United Nations for its climate change efforts, and curb contributions to its peacekeeping efforts. Contributions to the World Bank would be cut by $650 million, and economic and development assistance would be “refocused” to countries of greatest strategic interest to the United States.

©2017 The New York Times News Service