Nondefense vendors have $15.4 billion at risk in Trump’s budget

“When I hear if we cut foreign aid we can balance the budget, it’s just a complete lie”, said Graham, pointing to the relatively small size of the worldwide affairs budget.

“[President] Trump has vowed to protect these entitlement programs”.

But the White House proposal drew a sharp response from even Republicans on the Hill. The fiscal 2017 OCO budget request was $58.8 billion, and it’s highly likely that the Trump administration will add about $30 billion to this amount via a defense supplemental spending bill. Even those numbers are a bit uncertain.

It appears that Trump’s intention is to increase base defense spending by $54 billion rather than use OCO funding. He wants more military spending than the White House is proposing, though he also doesn’t support the funding cuts suggested.

Pierre Ferrari, CEO of Heifer International – a nongovernmental organization working to end poverty and hunger – said the cuts would be a “terrible move” because “poverty is often a key source of conflict” and urged the administration to keep global development assistance.

Military sequestration was meant to cap the rate of military spending increases into the future, and initially went into effect in 2013, leading to predictions of doom from top military leaders virtually from the moment it was announced.

The areas that won’t be affected by the shifting budget are mandatory items such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And again, the EPA budget represents a tiny sliver of federal spending.

In the current fiscal year, the State Department and USAID got $50.1 billion, a little more than 1 percent of the total federal budget. What’s in this pot? But they have nonetheless emphasized that much of the offsets will come from “foreign aid”, with the implication that foreigners will mainly feel the pinch. These are important domestic programs that are essential to building a successful society. Cuts of that size would make it tough for those programs to operate effectively.

Trump can not help the people he said he’d help with the budget he is circulating. That discretionary part of the budget has been squeezed over the past few years, while Republicans controlling Congress have largely ignored the ever-growing tide of automatic-pilot spending on benefit programs like food stamps, student loans, and Medicare. But those efforts have been unsuccessful in recent years. While the president provided no new details in his speech to Congress last night, he seemed prepared to charge ahead on those tax cuts: “It will be a big, big cut”, for businesses and “massive tax relief for the middle class”. Inexplicably, the hike would beef up the country’s ability to fight the sort of overseas wars that Trump railed against during the campaign, and would come at the expense of the diplomatic and foreign aid programs created to avert those conflicts, as well as domestic programs that protect the environment, help the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, and enforce the tax laws. It will be up to Congress to set the president’s heavy-handed approach aside and pursue a more responsible budget that better balances the nation’s priorities.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Washington Political Editor Matt Boyle, President Trump stated, “I want to increase our military spending significantly”. But he’ll have less success selling the kind of narrow but deep spending cuts he is signaling.

And U.S. aid to Lebanon and Jordan have provided stability to countries that host more than a million refugees each from the six-year civil war in Syria, he said. Other agencies, such as the Department of State, will reportedly see cuts to make up the difference.