Trump Seeks Deep Domestic Spending Cuts to Fund Military

Posted By Jason Ditz 

Setting the stage for what could be a huge battle with Congress, President Trump is set to formally deliver a budget for discal year 2018 which includes massive cuts across several departments, centering on domestic spending, as a way to pay for his planned military spending increases without increasing the budget deficit..

As had been previously reported, big cuts are coming for the State Department (28%) and the Environmental Protection Agency (30%). The biggest cut on a dollar basis is actually to the Department of Health and Human Services, however, with its $19.5 billion cut, while the Departments of Labor and Agriculture are also seeing in excess of 20% cuts.

Making such a proposal and getting such a proposal through Congress, however, are two different things, and Congressmen in both parties are calling this effort “dead on arrival,” and say they doubt a lot of the cuts have much chance of getting through the Senate.

Perhaps the shift in budget priorities most conspicuously absent from the Trump proposal, at least the details shown so far, are the tax cuts President Trump had previously talked about during his address to Congress, as the talk of letting Americans keep more of their money appears to have lost out to the administration’s desire to increase military spending.