Trump budget slashes unlikely to be approved

US President Donald Trump asked lawmakers to cut $3.6 trillion in government spending over the next decade, taking aim at healthcare and food assistance programmes for the poor in an austere budget that also boosts the military. Republicans who control the US Congress — and the federal purse strings — will decide whether to make politically sensitive cuts, and the proposal is unlikely to be approved in its current form.

Although it is not expected to survive on Capitol Hill, the proposal puts numbers on Trump’s vision of a government that radically cuts assistance to lower-income Americans.

The biggest savings would come from cuts to the Medicaid healthcare programme for the poor, which are embedded in a Republican healthcare bill passed by the House of Representatives.

Trump wants lawmakers to cut at least $610 billion from Medicaid and more than $192 billion from food stamps over a decade. He seeks to balance the budget within 10 years.

The Committee Federal Budget, a for a Responsible nonpartisan policy organisation, said the plan relied on gimmicks, unrealistic cuts and “rosy assumptions” of economic growth that would reach 3 per cent annually by the end of Trump’s first term.

The Congressional Budget Office projects the economy to grow at an annual pace of 1.9 per cent over that period.

The White House said its proposed tax cuts would help fuel higher growth and pay for themselves by generating an additional $2 trillion in revenue over 10 years.

Lawrence Summers, a former economic adviser to Democratic President Barack Obama, said the Trump administration was double-counting that money by saying it would help close budget deficits while also offsetting the revenue lost by cutting tax rates.

“It appears to be the most egregious accounting error in a presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them,” Summers wrote in the Washington Post

Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget office director, said his office made other assumptions that were probably too conservative. “We stand by the numbers,” he said.

Federal aid to states would shrink by 3 per cent, though the cuts would fall most heavily on states that backed Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. States that voted for Clinton would collectively face a drop of 4.8 per cent, while those that backed Trump would see assistance cut by 1.2 per cent.

There is some new spending in Trump’s plan for fiscal year 2018, which starts in October.

The Pentagon would get a spending hike, and there would be a $1.6 billion down payment to begin building a wall along the border with Mexico, which was a central promise of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Trump’s proposal foresees selling half of the US emergency oil stockpile, created in 1975 after the Arab oil embargo caused fears of price spikes. The announcement surprised oil markets and briefly pulled down US crude prices.

Republicans are under pressure to deliver on promised tax cuts, the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s economic agenda.

But the effort has stalled as the White House grapples with the political fallout from allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.

Mulvaney said the plan is the first one in a long time to pay attention to taxpayers.

“You have to have compassion for folks who are receiving the federal funds, but also you have to have compassion for the folks who are paying it,” he told reporters.

Republican leaders in the House said lawmakers would be able to find common ground with the budget plan.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who ran a populist campaign during the Democratic presidential primary, said the budget showed that Trump’s campaign promises to stand up for working people was “just cheap and dishonest campaign rhetoric that was meant to get votes,” Sanders told a news conference.

While the plan boosts defence spending by $54 billion, it falls short of campaign promises for a “historic” hike in military spending amid plans to rebuild the US Navy.

That is only 3 per cent more than former President Barack Obama had sought in his long-term budget plan.

The president would reduce nearly a third of funding for diplomacy and foreign aid including global health and food aid, peacekeeping and other forms of nonmilitary foreign involvement.

“If we implemented this budget, you’d have to retreat from the world or put a lot of people at risk,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

“This budget anywhere.” is not going to go