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Trump Proposes a Record $4.75 Trillion Budget

The president’s proposed budget for the 2020 fiscal year was delivered to Congress on Monday.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump sent Congress on Monday a record $4.75 trillion budget plan that calls for increased military spending and sharp cuts to domestic programs like education and environmental protection for the 2020 fiscal year.

Mr. Trump’s budget, the largest in federal history, includes a nearly 5 percent increase in military spending — which is more than the Pentagon had asked for — and an additional $8.6 billion for construction of a wall along the border with Mexico. It also contains what White House officials called a total of $1.9 trillion in cost savings from mandatory safety-net programs, like Medicaid and Medicare, the federal health care programs for the elderly and the poor.

The budget is unlikely to have much effect on actual spending levels, which are controlled by Congress. Democratic leaders in both the House and the Senate pronounced the budget dead on arrival on Sunday, and Mr. Trump’s budgets largely failed to gain traction in previous years, when fellow Republicans controlled both chambers.

But the blueprint is a declaration of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign priorities and the starting skirmish in the race for 2020, as both Republicans and Democrats try to carve out their messages to appeal to voters.

The president’s budget quickly antagonized Democrats while making clear the contours of how he plans to run for re-election. It is replete with aggressively optimistic economic assumptions and appeals to his core constituents, and it envisions deep cuts to programs that Democrats hold dear. Yet it projects trillion-dollar deficits for the next four years and does not balance the budget for 15 years.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, called the proposal “a gut punch to the American middle class.” He said Mr. Trump’s requested cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, “as well as numerous other middle-class programs, are devastating, but not surprising.”

The budget would curb the growth of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs Mr. Trump had previously pledged to leave intact. And it proposes shaving $818 billion from projected spending on Medicare over 10 years and cutting nearly $1.5 trillion from projected spending on Medicaid.

In place of the open-ended federal contribution to Medicaid, Mr. Trump would give states “market-based health care grants” — lump sums of federal money or per capita allotments — totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years. Congress rejected this idea in 2017 when Republicans proposed it because it would essentially cap Medicaid payments at a fixed level and would not keep pace with rising health care costs.

Mr. Trump also proposed new work requirements for working-age adult recipients of food stamps, federal housing support and Medicaid, a move the administration said would reduce spending on those programs by $327 billion over a decade because it would disqualify many who currently receive assistance.

Payments to a variety of health care providers would also be cut. Medicare payments to hospitals for unpaid bills and uncompensated care would be reduced by $136 billion over 10 years. Mr. Trump would cut projected Medicare payments to hospital outpatient departments by $131 billion over 10 years.

In addition, the budget squeezes more than $100 billion over 10 years from Medicare payments to nursing homes and home health agencies that care for Medicare patients who have left the hospital.

The president offers a suite of proposals to lower prescription drug prices, with federal savings estimated at $69 billion over 10 years. The changes to the drug program may have the effect of increasing premiums for Americans who rely on Medicare, but they would also, for the first time, limit the amount that seniors with very expensive drugs could be asked to pay each year. Some of the plans resemble proposals unsuccessfully offered by President Barack Obama.

And Mr. Trump proposed spending $26 billion less on Social Security programs, the federal retirement program, including a $10 billion cut to the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which provides benefits to disabled workers. Those cuts would be achieved in various ways, including more aggressively policing fraud in the program.

The largest reductions would come from spending on discretionary domestic programs, outside of the military, which would be cut by $1.1 trillion over the course of a decade.

Those cuts would not be across the board but would come from federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, which Mr. Trump once promised he would reduce to “little tidbits.” The budget proposes cutting the E.P.A.’s funding by 31 percent.

Significant reductions are also requested at other agencies responsible for the United States’ energy and environmental policies, including a 70 percent cut in renewable energy research and the elimination of climate science programs across an array of agencies.

The administration requested $31.7 billion for the Energy Department, an 11 percent drop from current funding. That includes about $696 million for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars in grants each year for research into electric vehicles, battery storage and building efficiency.

It targeted the Interior Department for a 14 percent decrease, dropping its overall budget to $12.5 billion.

While Congress is unlikely to accept most of the changes, they underscore the Trump administration’s commitment to unraveling Obama-era environmental regulations — particularly those addressing climate change — and to prioritizing the development of fossil fuel resources.

At the E.P.A., the administration aims to cut a $66 million collection of voluntary climate-change-related partnerships known as the Atmospheric Protection Program that, among other things, helps businesses and local governments track planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. It also zeros out $19 million that had been devoted to scientific research on climate change. Under a line item called “prioritize robust science,” the agency proposes a cut to $263 million from $481 million.

For the third year in a row, Mr. Trump’s budget would also cut funding for the Education Department, this time by 10 percent. Congress has repeatedly rejected efforts to reduce the department’s spending — lawmakers instead increased funding for the department last year — but an Education Department official said this year’s request reflected the “desire to have some fiscal discipline and address some higher priority needs.”

The budget seeks to cut more than two dozen programs, including a popular after-school program for many low-income students. It would eliminate higher-education programs, like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and subsidized federal Stafford loans, and reduce work-study funding as officials tweak the program to offer more career-oriented jobs for low-income students.

The budget also requests $700 million for school safety initiatives being coordinated by several agencies, including $200 million for the Education Department. The funding would help schools finance emergency operation plans, counseling and behavioral health programs. There are no requirements for firearms, the department said. A $1 billion federal grant program that school districts looked to tap last year for firearms would be eliminated.

A few domestic spending programs would see increases, if Mr. Trump’s budget were to become law. Those include efforts to reduce opioid addiction, as well as a 10 percent increase in health care spending for veterans. Mr. Trump will also propose a new voucher program for education, $200 billion in infrastructure spending and efforts to reduce the cost of prescription drugs.

The budget would not balance for 15 years, breaking Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to pay off the entire national debt within eight years. Mr. Trump’s first budget proposed balancing revenue and spending in 10 years. The budget released on Monday forecasts trillion-dollar deficits for four straight years, starting in 2019. Those are largely the result of Mr. Trump’s tax cut, which has been financed through increased government borrowing.

Budget details released by White House officials highlight several areas of conflict between Democrats and Mr. Trump, starting with immigration enforcement. Along with renewing the wall funding fight that led to a record government shutdown late last year, Mr. Trump is asking for more personnel at Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement and for a policy change meant to end so-called sanctuary cities, which do not hand over undocumented immigrants to federal officials when they are arrested in local crimes.

“This budget is a recipe for American decline,” said Representative John Yarmuth, Democrat of Kentucky and the chairman of the House Budget Committee. “It’s laughable that this budget is subtitled ‘Promises Kept,’ because in fact there are a lot of promises that have been violated in this budget.”

“This is a budget that we will not take seriously when we are working on our budget and spending priorities for 2020,” he said.

Disapproval from Democratic presidential candidates was just as blunt. “This is a budget for the military industrial complex, for corporate C.E.O.s, for Wall Street and for the billionaire class,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, said in a statement. “It is dead on arrival.”

Even some prominent Republicans greeted the president’s request somewhat coolly because it did not go far enough to reduce the growing national debt.

Representative Steve Womack, Republican of Arkansas and the ranking member on the Budget Committee, noted that only by cutting mandatory spending could the federal government seriously reduce deficits and debt.

“President Trump’s budget takes steps in the right direction, but there is still much work to do,” Mr. Womack said in a statement.

Administration officials fanned out to defend the budget. Russ Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, blamed Democrats and Congress for the ballooning deficit, even though Democrats have not controlled Congress for years.

“We do have large deficits. That’s why we’re here transparently saying that we have a problem as a country,” he said. “It takes a long time to get out of that mess.”

A correction was made on 
March 11, 2019

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of an immigration law enforcement agency. It is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not Customs and Immigration Enforcement.

How we handle corrections

Reporting was contributed by Robert Pear, Erica L. Green, Lisa Friedman, Margot Sanger-Katz and Emily Cochrane.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Record Budget Is Trump’s Shot Across the Bow. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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