Cabinet Members Testifying on Trump Budget on Capitol Hill

President Trump left those big retirement programmes alone in this year’s effort.

“This budget starts by taking away health care, then food, then housing, then education, then job opportunities”, Jayapal said.

The Trump administration’s budget proposal relies on economic growth assumptions that leading economists have warned are highly unlikely, somewhat “otherworldly”, writes Newsday’s Dan Janison.

Top officials in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are heading to Capitol Hill to defend his plans to cut domestic programs and parry Democratic criticism of his tax plans.

Experts say the numbers just don’t add up.

Those very people Mulvaney is citing – men and women forced to work multiple jobs due to low wages or to work overtime to make ends meet – are the people who will be hurt the most by Trump’s budget cuts. Which does nothing to explain this proposal’s cuts to important scientific research and federal agencies that provide front-line defenses against illnesses and epidemics, which after all do not recognize tax brackets when wreaking havoc on people’s lives.

“Almost every president’s budget proposal is basically dead on arrival, including President Obama’s”, Cornyn said. In a recent video published to the White House website, Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, asks American citizens to submit suggestions on how to make the government more efficient. He seeks to balance the budget within 10 years.

Trump’s balanced-budget goal depends not only on 3 percent growth projections that most economists view as overly optimistic but also a variety of accounting gimmicks, including an nearly $600 billion peace dividend from winding down overseas military operations and assuming that overhauling the tax code in a way that provides no net tax cuts would spark that growth and generate more than $2 trillion in higher revenues. If the USA economy did shift into a higher gear and begin growing at 3 percent on a sustained basis, Treasury bond yields would likely move far beyond the 3.8 percent rate the administration has assumed – possibly edging towards 5 percent based on historical data.

“It has to be a collaborative process and I hope that the administration will take our views into consideration moving forward”, said Rep. Leonard Lance, R-N.J., when asked whether the administration had taken Congress’ views into account.

Can you guess the last time we had an unemployment rate of 4.8 percent, growth of 3 percent and inflation held at 2 percent?

Of course, the growth expected under Obama never materialized.

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

At the same time, the blueprint boosts spending on the military by tens of billions and calls for $1.6 billion for a border wall with Mexico that Trump repeatedly promised voters the U.S. neighbor would finance. He’s also pledged to build a border wall that could cost tens of billions of dollars, a spending increase that isn’t reflected in the budget.

Mnuchin was appearing Wednesday before a House panel one day after the White House released Trump’s $4.1 trillion budget recommendation.

National Association of Clean Air Agencies executive director S. William Becker said he was astounded the administration didn’t change much from their initial March budget proposal, even after bipartisan opposition from Congress. Lawmakers recently reached a deal for government funding through September that cuts the EPA’s budget by around one percent.

President Donald Trump’s first full budget calls for deep cuts to popular health insurance programs that are part of the social safety net.

“Anytime you project a balanced budget and keep Social Security and Medicare off the books, you have a credibility problem”, said Holtz-Eakin.

Medicaid spending would fall from 2% of the economy to 1.7% in 2027 due to the reductions in spending projections by Mr Trump. Over a decade, a 1 percentage point miss would add roughly a trillion dollars to the federal debt, he said. When it comes to veterans and defense, reducing support for our many economically disadvantaged children seems like a tough way to help our vets – and certainly a questionable method of paying for a defense establishment that already spends more than the next seven countries combined.

Trump managed to thwart one of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s goals by appointing Montana GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke to run the Interior Department.

“There will be some concerns if we go too deep in some of these areas”, he said.

-Farmers: The budget plan would cut farm subsidies by $38 billion over the next decade.