Apr. 3, 2026, 4:49 PM EDT

The White House released a massive defense budget on Friday that would be historic if passed, as lawmakers and voters continue to express concerns about whether the month-long U.S. military operation against Iran could be more extensive than President Donald Trump has previously suggested.

The $1.5 trillion figure drew quick praise from Republican defense hawks, even as the plan relies on optimistic economic projections, calls for a 10% cut to domestic programs and comes amid an ongoing military campaign in Iran that administration officials say could end in a matter of weeks — though the question of whether ground troops will be deployed remains unresolved.

The budget faces steep odds in the Senate, where Democrats’ support is required for most agency-level spending proposals to clear the 60-vote threshold. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats will “fight this budget, tooth and nail.” That opposition puts even more weight on Trump’s push for a GOP-only pot of funds through budget reconciliation.

The document makes no mention of the expected debt or annual deficit — data that was regularly published in previous presidents’ budget plans. An Office of Management and Budget spokesperson confirmed the omission as well as the absence of data on expected mandatory spending on programs including Social Security and Medicare, which the administration said it plans to publish later in 2026.

Throughout his 2024 campaign and the first year of his second term, Trump promised to reduce the national debt and deficit through spending cuts, tariffs and investments. According to the Treasury Department’s most recent data, the national debt currently is $39 trillion and the deficit at $1.8 trillion.

Still, hawkish Republican lawmakers showered the plan with praise on Friday.

“President Trump’s budget is truly historic when it comes to defense spending,” Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a statement. Graham is expected to be a key architect of any upcoming reconciliation bill. “It is the most robust increase in defense spending in many years, and it is more than justified by the threats we face throughout the world.”

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chairs of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, pledged in a joint statement to “pass this budget into law,” saying the military boost would “drive the U.S. toward a defense budget of 5% of GDP — a benchmark we have long supported as necessary to maintain our national defense.”

The reconciliation pitch is logistically challenging. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Thursday any additional reconciliation work would be “hard and cumbersome” following the months of painstaking negotiations required to pass last year’s Republican tax-and-spending bill.

Trump’s budget also envisions deep reductions after the proposed 2027 surge: The defense budget would drop by 15% in 2028 and would freeze at less than $1.4 trillion in subsequent years. Over the longer term, the proposal calls for a decrease in military spending as a share of the economy, dropping it to 2.6% of GDP in 2036.

Trump’s economic projections are notably optimistic. The budget assumes an annual inflation-adjusted “real GDP growth” rate of 2.9% indefinitely — more than a full percentage point higher than the 1.8% long-term forecast from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Amid ongoing battles in Congress over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the budget proposal notes that the Working Families Tax Cut Act delivered more than $190 billion for border security and immigration enforcement programs over five years, including $10 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and $18.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection. Trump nonetheless requested an additional $63 billion in discretionary budget authority for the DHS for 2027 — a 3.3% decrease from the level in the 2026 continuing resolution.

The proposal calls for a wide range of other cuts and program eliminations. It directs Congress to begin “the process of privatizing” airport security screening at the TSA, projecting $52 million in savings, and cuts $1.3 billion in non-disaster grant programs at FEMA, an agency Trump has repeatedly derided as “expensive.”

The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency would see a $707 million cut. The budget plan criticizes the agency’s work that “focused on so-called misinformation and propaganda.”

NASA would face a 23% budget cut, including the elimination of the Mars Sample Return mission.

Health programs would take broad hits. The Department of Health and Human Services would see a 12.5% reduction from the prior year, including a $5 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health, a $4 billion reduction to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and an $819 million cut to the Unaccompanied Alien Children program.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s annual budget would be cut in half, with reductions to state grants and Superfund cleanup programs, among others.

The National Park Service would receive $2.5 billion in overall budgetary resources, a $739 million — or 23% — cut from last year.

Foreign aid would face continued reductions, building on the 2025 DOGE campaign that shuttered the United States Agency for International Development. The budget proposes eliminating funding for Food for Peace grants and the National Endowment for Democracy.

The proposal would also eliminate several Department of Housing and Urban Development programs that provide assistance to low-income and marginalized communities, including the Community Development Block Grant, the Homeless Assistance Program and Native American programs.

Despite Trump’s pledge to dismantle the Education Department, the budget proposes a comparatively modest cut to the agency — $76.5 billion in discretionary authority, a 2.9% decrease from 2026. It seeks to restructure K-12 programs to reduce the federal role in education and would cut funding to colleges and universities by $2.7 billion, including programs serving minority-serving institutions.

The sweeping cuts to non-military programs will only deepen Democratic opposition. And nearly all of the budget — apart from the $350 billion reconciliation component — will require 60 Senate votes to advance.

“The vision President Trump has outlined for America in his budget is bleak and unacceptable,” Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a statement. “President Trump wants to slash medical research to fund costly foreign wars. It doesn’t get more backward than that, and the only responsible thing to do with a budget this morally bankrupt is to toss it in the trash.”

Apr. 3, 2026, 6:57 PM EDT

ByEvette Dionne

When actor and singer Brandy Norwood was 16 years old, she was the star of the prime-time sitcom “Moesha,” a coming-of-age series in which the teenager in Los Angeles’ Leimart Park neighborhood navigates typical teenage crises, including being pressured to have sex by her crushes and eventually figuring out how to get a prescription for the birth control pill. According to “Phases,” a memoir the 47-year-old Norwood released this week, even as her character Moesha was secretly dating the boys her dad, Frank, forbid her to see, Brandy was keeping the truth from her real-life parents that she was in a sexual relationship with Boyz II Men’s Wanya Morriswho was then 22 years old.

Morris has not responded to multiple news outlets asking him to confirm or deny Brandy’s claims, but he has always denied that he slept with her before she was 18 years old. During a 2020 Instagram Live video, he said he and Norwood were “hanging around each other so much that there became to be some sort of connection, an intimate connection,” but there was no sex until Brandy was “of age.”

“You can ask Brandy, she will tell you the same story,” Morris said then. But that’s not what Brandy is saying now.

In her book, she writes that Morris “took advantage” of her.

“I was in over my head,” she writes in “Phases.” “Sneaking around with Wanya and lying to my parents had become a constant. They barely liked the idea of me dating at all and telling them about us was out of the question.”

If the two vocalists were sleeping with each other when Brandy said they were, then her parents’ anger would not have been her only concern. Brandy’s profile was rising. There was her music career and “Moesha” to think about. Less than two years after her show debuted, she played Cinderella to Whitney Houston’s Fairy Godmother in “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella” on ABC.

“Wanya and I understood, with diamond-cut clarity, that public knowledge of our relationship would ignite scandal, potentially threatening everything we’d both worked for, so he and I opted for elaborate fiction,” Brandy writes. “We would pretend patience and claim we were waiting until my eighteenth birthday before pursuing any romantic connection.”

We have seen variations of Brandy’s story before, particularly in the music industry.  Long before he was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for racketeering and violating the Mann Act, a 27-year-old R. Kelly secretly married 15-year-old Aaliyah. A 24-year-old Elvis Presley began dating Priscilla Beaulieu when she was 14 years old.

As far as Brandy’s story goes, it remains unsettling that so many girls — Black and otherwise, famous and unknown — report experiences of older men they trusted preying on their vulnerabilities instead of protecting them. Because we are more culturally aware than we have ever been about power dynamics in age-gap relationships, the hope is there will be fewer girls of all races and ethnicities who are subjected to these relationships and the coercion and manipulation that so often accompanies them.

As played by Brandy, Moesha was one of the most three-dimensional characters on television: She sometimes made poor decisions, but she got to be morally complicated and live in the grays in a way Brandy, the teenager portraying her, could not. As Brandy details in “Phases,” there were so many expectations placed on her as a Black girl in the public eye to be as close to morally pure as possible.

In an interview with NPRBrandy said fame, including being Disney’s first Black princess, cost her “my childhood, my privacy, my identity.” If there had been any evidence then that she was in a sexual relationship with an adult male celebrity, then she almost certainly would have been seen as the “fast and grown” girl who had chased him and not a teenager that, as she now says, was taken advantage of. Her reputation would have been ruined, and his likely would have been unscathed.

Unfortunately, the idea of the “fast” girl who seduces adult men still persists, even if not to the same extent. In her book, Brandy holds compassion for her 16-year-old self. “The shame ends here,” she concludes powerfully in the book’s chapter about her relationship with Morris. “The silence ends here. I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn’t handle rejection. I was not an unstable obsessive fan. I was a child. And he was an adult. And it’s time the world understood the difference.”