Is raising the Defense budget by 10% ($54 billion) something to boast about? How much of that 10% will go towards the healthcare needs of those are presently serving or served in the past?
Hey I’m all for budget cuts and keeping revenue to pay down debt but is this just a shell game when it comes to the budget as a whole, meaning reducing one department budget while raising another? – PB/TK
Trump plans to cut funding for most government agencies – Rick Newman
President Donald Trump is preparing a “security budget” that will ramp up spending for the Pentagon while slashing funding for most other federal agencies.
Trump plans to increase defense spending by $54 billion per year, which would be a 10% increase. He’d cut funding for most other agencies by $54 billion to keep his overall budget from adding to the national debt. “Most federal programs will see a reduction,” an official with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told reporters on Monday.
Trump has made no secret of his desire to scale back regulatory agencies, especially the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But such agencies tend to have modest budgets compared with the cost of military troops and hardware. The EPA’s entire budget is around $8 billion, for instance. That’s only two-thirds the cost of a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, which comes with a price tag of about $13 billion.
Other than defense, the biggest portion of the federal budget goes toward Medicare and Social Security. Trump hasn’t proposed any cuts to those two popular programs, but he does favor changes in the way Medicaid funds, which provide healthcare for the poor, are spent, which could lead to cutbacks.
The OMB official said a budget blueprint the White House plans to release in mid-March would contain large cutbacks in foreign aid. “The budget expects the rest of the world to step up in some of the programs America has been so generous in funding,” he said. Total funding for the State Department and the US Agency for International Development totals about $50 billion per year. But the amount going to foreign countries in the form of aid is much smaller, and Trump will almost certainly have trouble finding $54 billion per year, or even a portion of that, in such programs.
Continue to yahoo.com/finance article: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trump-plans-to-cut-funding-for-most-government-agencies-160756646.html
