President Trump’s 2021 budget proposal prompted immediate opposition from House and Senate Democrats, who condemned the plan’s 6% cut to nondefense spending and its provisions to slow the growth of entitlements.
“With his latest budget proposal, it’s hard to imagine that President Trump could do any more to double-cross the very American workers and middle-class families he promised to help just last week in his State of the Union address,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said Monday. “As typical, President Trump’s budget shows his State of the Union address was lie upon lie to the American people.”
Senate Republicans greeted the plan with muted praise, pointing to elements of the proposal they favored.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, praised the proposed education tax credit scholarship that would help low-income families escape failing public schools.
Alexander also praised the budget’s $1 billion proposed increase for career and technical education.
Congress is unlikely to adopt Trump’s $4.8 trillion budget proposal, but some elements of the plan will likely be incorporated in spending legislation adopted in the GOP-led Senate.
The budget includes $1 trillion for infrastructure, which could serve as a starting point for negotiations with Democrats, for example.
Trump’s budget sets defense spending at $740.5 billion, a less than 0.5% increase over fiscal 2020 spending.
It requests $590 billion for nondefense spending, a 5% reduction the Trump administration said “reflects restraint,” that, combined with the 2017 tax cuts, “will keep the U.S. economy thriving and America prosperous for generations to come.”
Democrats said the cuts and cost controls implemented in the budget would hurt the very people Trump sought to appeal to in his State of the Union address last week.
“Year after year, President Trump’s budgets have sought to inflict devastating cuts to critical lifelines that millions of Americans rely on,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said.
“Less than a week after promising to protect families’ healthcare in his State of the Union address, the president is now brazenly inflicting savage multibillion-dollar cuts to Medicare and Medicaid — at the same time that he is fighting in federal court to destroy protections for people with preexisting conditions and dismantle every other protection and benefit of the Affordable Care Act.”
The Trump administration budget includes work requirements for some food stamp recipients, and it projects Medicare savings in the hundreds of millions by cutting waste and altering payment systems for uncompensated care and rehabilitative care.
Presidential budgets are almost always rejected by Congress. Lawmakers prefer to set their own spending levels and negotiate between the parties on final numbers for each of the one dozen federal budgets.
Trump’s proposal slashes many of those budgets well below what either party would accept.
Health and Human Services, for example, would see a 10% budget reduction, while the Environmental Protection Agency budget would be slashed by 26% from 2020 levels.
