Welfare cut by $1.7 trillion in White House budget plans

THE White House is to release President Trump’s first full budget proposal today which would make $1.7 trillion (£1.3trillion) in cuts from social spending programmes over a decade.

It will include a cut of more than $800 billion (£614 billion) from the Medicaid health programme for the poor. There would also be a $193 billion (£148billion) reduction in spending on food stamps over 10 years, amounting to more than 25 per cent.

Some Republicans criticised the proposed level of cuts, including to farm subsidies.

“We think it’s wrongheaded. Production agriculture is in the worst slump since the depression. They need a safety net,” said Mike Conaway, the Republican representative from Texas who chairs the House agriculture committee.

Mr Trump’s blueprint for the 2018 budget year will also include a plan for $200billion (£154billion) in funding to encourage state and local governments to boost spending on roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure programmes, and a $25 billion (£19 million) plan to give parents six weeks of paid leave after the birth of a child.

Presidential budgets are suggestions and have to be approved in Congress.

Senator John Hoeven, a Republican member of the Senate appropriations committee, said: “The budget’s a starting point. We’ll go to work from there.”

Republicans are under pressure to deliver promised tax cuts and may insist on some of the measures in Mr Trump’s proposal in order to achieve that.

Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s chief strategist, and Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, returned to Washington before the budget announcement.

Both men were with Mr Trump for the first leg of his foreign trip in Saudi Arabia.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokesman, said they had always “planned to come for the first stop and then head back for the budget roll-out”.

Dozens of students walked out of Notre Dame University’s graduation ceremony in protest during a speech by Vice President Mike Pence.

In his speech, Mr Pence said many American university campuses had succumbed to “political correctness which amounts to nothing less than the suppression of the freedom of speech”.