Trump asks Congress to supersize military budget, slash domestic programs

President Donald Trump called Friday for Congress to back a $1.5 trillion defense budget alongside yawning reductions to domestic programs — making official the ambitious military increase he’s been teasing for months.

In a slate of budget fact sheets ahead of an expected broader rollout of the president’s fiscal blueprint, the White House detailed a military budget hike of more than 40 percent for the fiscal year that begins in October. The Trump administration is formally proposing Republicans in Congress enact a large chunk of that defense cash — some $350 billion — using the party-line reconciliation process to skirt the Senate filibuster and forgo bipartisan negotiations.

Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are starting to embrace the concept of sidelining Democrats to boost Pentagon dollars and immigration enforcement accounts currently unfunded amid the broader Department of Homeland Security shutdown. But Trump will struggle to build enough political will on his own side of the aisle to fulfill his defense goals as fiscal conservatives demand commensurate spending cuts after grudgingly backing the multi-trillion-dollar tax and spending package Republicans enacted along party lines last summer.

While calling for a historic increase in the military’s budget, the White House is also seeking a 10 percent cut to nondefense spending, with a proposed reduction of $73 billion from federal programs outside the military. Major targets of the administration’s proposed spending reductions are environmental programs across many federal agencies, including nixing $15 billion in grants for efforts such as renewable energy technology and $4 billion in transportation funds for programs supporting infrastructure to charge electric vehicles.

The administration is recommending that Congress eliminate $1.6 billion in research programs run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and asking lawmakers to find $45 million in savings by slashing the Interior Department’s renewable energy programs. The White House wants another $642 million in cuts to “woke and wasteful international financial institutions” within the Treasury Department budget.

The blueprint, prepared by White House budget chief Russ Vought, proposes the elimination of current fair housing initiatives at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund that awards funding to community banks and other financial institutions that lend to communities traditionally underserved by the banking industry.

It also calls for Congress to zero out funding for the Commerce Department agency that promotes minority-owned businesses and the National Endowment for Democracy, which promotes freedom in countries with authoritarian regimes that threaten U.S. interests.

For the second year in a row, Trump’s fiscal framework arrives months late and is not expected to include all of the data lawmakers rely on to write funding bills for the upcoming fiscal year. Last year, Republican lawmakers were still pressing Vought for those details well into the summer.