Wall Street Journal
By Kate Davidson
February 12, 2018
The White House on Monday proposed a $4.4 trillion fiscal 2019 budget that would boost federal spending for the military, infrastructure and border security while making cuts to federal health-care programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
President Donald Trump’s plan would widen the federal budget deficit to $984 billion in the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. One big difference from last year’s budget proposal is that Mr. Trump has given up for now on balancing the budget over the next decade, following enactment of a major tax cut and two-year budget deal that analysts estimate will push the deficit above $1 trillion next year.
The proposal will likely have limited influence on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers last week passed a bipartisan agreement that set overall funding levels for the next two years and boosted spending for defense and domestic programs by $300 billion. Still, the annual White House budget is a window into an administration’s spending priorities and a Washington ritual that helps to set the tone of political debate between and within parties.
The proposal includes more than $23 billion of spending on border security and immigration enforcement, $85.5 billion on veterans’ medical care and nearly $17 billion to help combat the opioid epidemic.
Monday’s budget release also coincides with the long-awaited rollout of Mr. Trump’s infrastructure initiative, one of his biggest legislative priorities for 2019.
He is proposing to spend $200 billion on infrastructure over 10 years, mostly in the form of new, competitive grants designed to encourage states and cities to raise their own money for improving rails, airports, highways and water systems. The proposal also would expand federal loan programs for such projects and would streamline the permitting process for infrastructure projects.
The White House estimates the proposal would lead to $1.5 trillion in new investment.
The president also proposes $2.7 billion to pay for the detention of an average 52,000 undocumented immigrants a day at centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency’s highest-ever detention level, according to the White House budget office. The budget proposes $782 million to hire an additional 2,750 border-patrol and immigration-enforcement officers, and a total of $18 billion over fiscal 2018 and 2019 to build a wall along the Mexican border, thanks to the new spending agreement.
The president’s budget also assumes the economy can grow at a much faster pace than independent forecasters project, and with lower inflation and government borrowing costs—factors that help to project slimmer deficits in the back half of the budget’s 10-year forecast.
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