President Trump’s budget proposal

President Donald Trump may be proposing trillions in spending cuts over the next decade in his 2021 budget request — but none of the cuts would affect the immigration enforcement agencies, which would instead get a significant boost.

The president would invest heavily in construction of his southern border wall, expanding immigration detention and staffing up the immigration agencies. It’s another way to show voters that he’s tough on immigration as he goes up for reelection.

President Donald Trump’s 2020 budget breaks one of his biggest campaign promises to voters: that he would leave Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare untouched.

“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump told the Daily Signal, a conservative publication affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, in 2015.

President Donald Trump’s 2020 budget proposal asks for billions of dollars to “finish” building 722 miles of wall along the US-Mexico border. Buried in the budget summary is a proposal to make legal immigrants help pay for it.

A budget “fact sheet” on border security, released as part of the Trump administration’s proposal Monday, suggests adding a 10 percent surcharge to immigration filing fees for the purposes of “deficit reduction.”

Democratic presidential candidates have spent years building a new vision of American policy, one where a lot more of us get our health insurance from the government.

I see President Trump’s newly released budget as his counterproposal to all that. It envisions a really different future, one where government-run health care shrinks — and public programs become more difficult to sign up for.

The Trump administration’s 2020 budget proposal is out, and one thing is obvious: The administration doesn’t think spending at the National Institutes of Health is a very good deal.

The budget suggests cutting $4.5 billion, around 11 percent of the agency’s 2019 budget. We should say that estimates of the total cut reported by different news outlets range from $4.5 billion to $6 billion. Some of the stated figures in the budget document might be wrong. “The most defensible number ... might be -$4.9 billion,” Matthew Hourihan, R&D budget analysis director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says in an email. But he’s still figuring it out. In any case, it’s a lot of money.

We already knew Donald Trump broke a lot of promises by including trillions of dollars in spending cuts in his first presidential budget. The Congressional Budget Office said today, in its official analysis of that budget, that he appears to have broken an even bigger one: his promise to balance the budget in 10 years.

Trump’s fiscal year 2018 budget proposed a 50 percent reduction in Medicaid outlays (even though candidate Trump promised not to cut Medicaid) and a huge cut in the Social Security Disability Insurance fund (candidate Trump promised not to cut Social Security). He also offered about $250 billion in additional cuts to programs for the poor (food assistance, earned income tax credit, child tax credit) and huge reductions in almost every federal agency’s budget.

The Congressional Budget Office just released its analysis of President Trump’s budget proposal, released earlier this year. The proposal called for trillions of dollars of budget cuts over 10 years, including to programs for the poor, and giant cuts to some federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department.

Trump claimed those budget cuts would eliminate the deficit in 10 years — but the CBO found it would do no such thing.

President Trump’s first budget, which he and his budget director claimed would erase the federal deficit within 10 years, would do no such thing, the Congressional Budget Office concludes in a new analysis.

The cuts in the president’s budget would, the CBO finds, dramatically reduce the deficit, by about $4.2 trillion over 10 years (more than the $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction in Obama’s final budget). But even with those cuts, the total deficit would only be reduced by one-third rather than wiped out completely, as the Trump administration had claimed.

A new analysis by the Tax Policy Center finds that the tax cuts included in the Trump administration’s outline for tax reform released in April could cut federal revenues by as much as $7.8 trillion over 10 years, and that the benefits would go almost exclusively to the top 5 percent of earners.

Even if the plan included some very large tax hikes to offset the cuts (like doing away with personal exemptions and other common deductions) and taking into account effect on economic growth, the cost still comes to $3.4 trillion over 10 years. The cost would be even greater once you take into account the interest the US would have to pay on all that debt. For context, a $3.4 trillion tax cut would amount to about 12 percent of GDP in 2027, slightly larger than all the tax cuts George W. Bush passed while in office.

My name is Christine, and I get food stamps. I’ve had to apply off and on over the past 18 years, in order to make sure my family was fed. I don’t feel the least bit ashamed of myself for this, but apparently some people think I should.

Some people think I and people like me are lazy.

It’s never a good sign when one of the most conservative and pro-military Republicans on Capitol Hill says that President Trump’s defense budget is “basically the Obama approach with a little bit more, but not much.”

But that was the response from Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, when he digested Trump’s first defense budget — and how different it is from what candidate Trump had promised.

Tucked into President Trump’s 2018 budget request, in the form of language rewriting a 1996 law governing local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, is a new front in the Trump administration’s war on “sanctuary cities” — jurisdictions that don’t help federal immigration agents scoop up unauthorized immigrants (and that happen, generally, to be under Democratic control).

The Trump administration is asking Congress to make it illegal for any law enforcement officer not to comply “with any lawful request” from federal immigration agents — including requests to hold immigrants after they’d normally be released from jail, so that federal agents can pick them up.

3.3 million more abortions. 15,000 more mothers dying. 8 million more unplanned pregnancies. Up to 26 million fewer women and couples acquiring contraception and family planning advice.

Those grim numbers from the Guttmacher Institute show the potential real-world impact of the Trump administration’s unprecedented proposed cuts to global family planning efforts; the budget the White House released Tuesday would basically eliminate those programs.

Tens of thousands of people will likely die of drug overdoses under President Donald Trump’s watch, as America’s horrific opioid epidemic continues. Yet with his first big policy document — the 2018 budget proposal — Trump is proving that he’ll do little to nothing about the crisis.

If anything, Trump’s proposal could make the opioid epidemic worse. Where the budget does anything of significance regarding the epidemic, it comes through cuts to the office in charge of coordinating drug policy, Medicaid, public health programs, and more. And there is nothing in the budget to balance out the cuts — leaving a crater in the government’s response to a crisis that led to more than 33,000 opioid overdose deaths and more than 52,000 total drug overdose deaths in 2015.

The Trump administration’s strategy for building the infamous border wall has shifted from “shock and awe” to something more like “slow and steady.”

Its 2018 budget, released Tuesday, contains a request for Congress to give the administration $1.6 billion for wall construction. That might sound like a lot, but it’s way down from the $2.6 billion request in the original “skinny budget” released in March — which was supposed to come on top of $3 billion in immediate funding Trump asked Congress to pass this spring.

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget will win over conservatives with its calls to slash spending on anti-poverty programs. But Trump is also proposing something Republicans have long resisted: requiring employers to provide paid family leave to workers after the birth or adoption of a child.

Trump’s budget proposal, which the White House outlined on Tuesday, includes funding for a program that gives fathers and mothers six weeks of paid time off to care for a new child. It’s expected to cost $25 billion over 10 years and would benefit 1.3 million caregivers, according to the Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget. The paid leave would be provided through unemployment insurance programs at the state level, so each state would need to find a way to pay for it.

Not only does the Trump administration’s budget proposal rely on economic growth assumptions that are wildly more optimistic than those produced by any private sector forecaster, but it turns out that embedded within those assumptions is a completely ridiculous accounting error.

Here’s how it works. The budget is counting on economic growth — and a lot of it — to overcome what otherwise would be a projected $1.3 trillion deficit in 2027 and instead achieve balance. A big part of that growth comes from a deficit-neutral tax proposal whose details aren’t spelled out in the budget document.

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised to be the candidate who would not cut Medicaid.

”I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump said in May 2015.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump will unveil the first comprehensive budget proposal of his presidency, encompassing proposals affecting defense and non-defense funding for government agencies, tax changes, and funding for social insurance and assistance programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.

The budget broadly resembles plans put forward by now-House Speaker Paul Ryan, who as the House Budget Committee chair released a series of extremely aggressive budgets including trillions in cuts to programs for the poor. While Trump largely leaves Medicare and old-age insurance from Social Security unscathed, and boosts funding for border security, veterans, and defense, he cuts just about everything else.

One of Donald Trump’s most consistent positions throughout the presidential election was that he would not, under any circumstances, cut Social Security. Let’s roll the tape:

He’s even challenged other Republicans on the issue, telling WROK radio in Wisconsin, “Paul [Ryan] wants to knock out Social Security, knock it down, way down. He wants to knock Medicare way down. … I want to keep Social Security intact. … I’m not going to cut it, and I’m not going to raise ages, and I’m not going to do all of the things that they want to do. But they want to really cut it, and they want to cut it very substantially, the Republicans, and I’m not going to do that.”

One of the silver linings in President Donald Trump’s first budget blueprint was the supposed addition of $500 million in fiscal year 2018 to fight the opioid epidemic. Finally, it seemed, Trump was living up to his promise to “expand treatment for those who have become so badly addicted.”

We now know, however, that Trump’s budget blueprint line on opioids was misleading — and Trump is not, in fact, proposing an increase in drug treatment spending above funding that already exists.

The idea of defunding public media in the United States, as President Trump’s new budget proposes, is nothing new according to Shane Iverson, “but it’s serious every time it happens.”

Iverson is the general manager of a small public broadcast station in Bethel, Alaska — one of the only reliable news sources in the Bethel Census Area. And if the Trump budget were to pass, it would cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which would in turn mean that his station might not get the money it needs to stay open.

Stephen Colbert was so floored by the idea of President Donald Trump’s budget slashing programs like the National Endowment for the Arts and Meals on Wheels that he called in a big gun to address it: his own alter-ego, “fiscal conservative” pundit Stephen Colbert.

“I’m here because America needs me,” said his counterpart, arching his brow over a pair of wire-rimmed glasses instead of The Late Show host’s usual thick black specs. He then launched into a special edition of “The Werd,” a deeply sarcastic segment that lets Colbert (the real person, not the character) parse through reasoning he clearly thinks is ridiculous from the perspective of someone who might not, while silly puns pop up on the other side of the screen.

Even though it was 15 years ago, I still remember the first time I helped deliver Meals on Wheels.

I was in college at the time, I had very little clue what the program even was. All I knew was that a lady from my campus church was asking for volunteers to help her deliver meals to nearby seniors.

On his show on Friday, March 17, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson said the National Endowment for the Arts “is, in effect, welfare for rich, liberal elites. That’s who consumes the products that they produce.”

The NEA has often been targeted by conservatives for elimination, and was once again fingered in President Trump’s budget proposal for defunding.