White House releases budget requests
Priorities include schools, health care, housing
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 of fice 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 bipar tisan suppor t across the board,” Biden said before an Oval Office meeting with his economics team, though prominent Senate Republicans immediately complained the plan would short change the militar y and national security in boosting domestic programs.
Bipar tisanship in 2011 also restricted Democrats’ ambitions, a problem they’re now tr ying to address. White House press secretar y 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 “discretionar y spending,” roughly onethird of the huge federal budget that is passed by Congress each year, funding the militar y, domestic Cabinet depar tment operations, foreign policy and homeland security. The rest of the budget involves so-called mandator y 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 countr y 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 fouryear 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 militar y accounts.
The Biden administration believes the caps, imposed by a long-abandoned 2011 budget deal, caused a decade of severe underinvestment in public ser vices 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 discretionar y funding, about equal to the 30-year average relative to the overall U.S. economy.
Biden wants to increase the Education Depar tment’s budget by a massive 40.8% to $102.8 billion, which includes an additional $20 billion in grants for high-pover ty schools.
The Depar tment of Health Human Ser vices would get a 23.1% boost to $133.7 billion. There would be additional funds to combat opioid addiction and for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose mission took on new urgency in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. The administration is also asking for $6.5 billion to establish a biomedical research agency to address cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and other diseases.
Biden is seeking a $14 billion increase across government agencies to address climate change. It’s par t of a whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis that includes billions to boost environmental justice for communities near refineries, power plants and other hazardous sites.
Housing and Urban Development would get a 15.1% increase to $68.7 billion, primarily to provide housing vouchers for an additional 200,000 families. The administration also seeks more money for civil rights enforcement addressing gun violence as a public health epidemic.
The plan also details how the Biden administration will tr y to deal with the influx of arrivals at the U.S. southern border. It includes $861 million to invest in Central America to address the forces driving people to migrate to the United States. An additional $345 million would go to immigration ser vices to resolve delays in years-long naturalization and asylum cases.