Budget seeks more for schools, health, housing

President Joe Biden released a $1.5trillion wish list for his first federal budget Friday.

WASHINGTON >> President Joe Biden released a $1.5 trillion wish list for his first federal budget Friday, asking for substantial gains for Democratic priorities including education, health care, housing and environmental protection.

The request by the White House budget office for an 8.4% increase in agency operating budgets spells out Biden’s top priorities as Congress weighs its spending plans for next year. It’s the first financial outline of the Democrats’ broader ambitions since the expiration of a 2011 law that capped congressional spending.

“I’m hoping it’ll have some bipartisan support across the board,” Biden said before an Oval Office meeting with his economics team, though prominent Senate Republicans immediately complained the plan would shortchange the military and national security in boosting domestic programs.

Bipartisanship in 2011 also restricted Democrats’ ambitions, a problem they’re now trying to address. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration was “inheriting a legacy of chronic underinvestment” because of the caps.

“The president is focused on reversing this trend and reinvesting in the foundations of our strength,” she told reporters at a briefing.

At stake is “discretionary spending,” roughly one-third of the huge federal budget that is passed by Congress each year, funding the military, domestic Cabinet department operations, foreign policy and homeland security. The rest of the budget involves so-called mandatory programs with locked-in spending, chiefly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The Biden request provides a significantly smaller 1.6% increase for the $700 billion-plus Pentagon budget than for domestic accounts. Homeland security accounts would basically be frozen, reflecting opposition among Democratic progressives to immigration security forces.

Senate Republicans were quick to criticize the modest proposed increase for defense, with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe, Florida’s Marco Rubio, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Alabama’s Richard Shelby releasing a joint statement.

“Talk is cheap, but defending our country is not,” they said. “We can’t afford to fail in our constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense. To keep America strong, we must balance domestic and defense spending priorities.”

The appropriations process was one of the few consistent success stories of former President Donald Trump’s tumultuous four-year tenure in office, but this year’s budget cycle is not governed by the formal spending “caps” of a broader outline. The lapse of those caps opens the door to more domestic spending favored by Biden and Democrats but invites a battle with Republicans over military accounts.

The Biden administration believes the caps, imposed by a long-abandoned 2011 budget deal, caused a decade of severe underinvestment in public services that the president is now trying to turn around with large increases that would mostly bypass national security programs.

The administration says the request would bring spending in line with historical averages. It seeks $769 billion in non-defense discretionary funding, about equal to the 30-year average relative to the overall U.S. economy.

ANDREW HARNIK — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS President Joe Biden, accompanied by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, right, speaks as he gets his weekly economic briefing in the Oval Office of the White House, April 9, in Washington.