President’s budget likely DOA in Congress

WASHINGTON — The nation’s new president unveiled a budget proposal Thursday. But its fate is likely to be the same as most presidential budgets: It won’t pass.

Historically, lawmakers don’t pass presidential budgets introduced to much fanfare — like President Donald Trump’s was Thursday — even if the president is of the same party that controls Congress.

“It’s kind of a tradition to declare the new president’s budget ‘dead on arrival,’” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog. “Congress is going to do what it is going to do.”

Trump unveiled a $1.15 trillion spending plan that was chock full of the same proposals that have been offered up before by his Republican predecessors as they all aimed to make good on campaign pledges to shrink the size of the federal government and cut waste.

Some of those familiar proposals: eliminating money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts, reducing funding for the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency, and slashing federal dollars to Amtrak.

But lawmakers just can’t seem to support those sorts of cuts when they consider what they would mean to their constituents.

“Cutting programs means cutting programs in their community,” said Leon Panetta, who served as President Bill Clinton’s budget director and chairman of House Budget Committee. “They can’t sustain it politically.”

Trump’s spending proposal for the 2018 fiscal year, which begins Oct.1, includes a $54 billion increase in defense spending, which would require Congress to end defense-spending caps agreed to in 2011.

Military and border security would increase dramatically. Programs combating global warming and providing legal aid for the poor would be slashed. And $4.1 billion would be spent to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“No matter who the president is or whose party controls the White House, this budget is not considered a viable and realistic plan for spending,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla. “As the saying goes: ‘The president proposes and the Congress disposes.’ This means that it is the members of Congress who pass appropriation bills, not the president.”