WASHINGTON — The U.S. military budget would swell to its highest-ever sum and domestic immigration agents would receive another influx of funding under President Donald Trump’s latest budget proposal, which calls for deep cuts to social services, environmental efforts, scientific research and children’s programs.
Out of a roughly $2.2 trillion budget, the White House called for the majority, $1.5 trillion, to go toward national defense — an approximate increase of 42% for defense. The administration is banking on $350 billion of that total to come from a budget process outside the regular appropriations cycle.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said at the White House last week. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [level]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
Trump’s budget would slash spending on non-defense programs by 10%, while allocating $10 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and $18.5 billion to Customs and Border Protection. Both agencies possess funding that will last years.
Trump’s record-breaking budget request lands more than a month into a war the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran without approval from Congress or the U.N. Security Council.
“There is no military objective that justifies the wholesale destruction of a society’s infrastructure or the deliberate infliction of suffering on civilian populations,” said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
After Trump on Tuesday morning threatened to destroy Iranian civilization, including civilian infrastructure, Democratic lawmakers and international leaders called for Trump to tone down his threats.
Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives demanded the chamber “immediately” gavel back into session and vote to end the war with Iran. The House has been out on a two-week recess.
“The House must come back into session immediately and vote to end this reckless war of choice in the Middle East before Donald Trump plunges our country into World War III,” the Democratic lawmakers said.
Rep. Rob Menendez (D-8th) said the Cabinet should invoke the 25th amendment to the Constitution, a measure that allows a majority of the Cabinet plus the vice president to remove the president from office if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
“That is where we are, and there is no way around it,” Menendez said. “We cannot sit idly by while we watch an unhinged, erratic president drag us deeper into wars and conflicts that do not serve the interests of the American people.”
Separately, John Larson, a Democrat from Connecticut, filed new articles of impeachment against Trump, accusing the sitting president of, among other acts, starting unauthorized wars against Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Nigeria and Gaza.
Trump was twice impeached in his first term — first for pressuring the Ukrainian government to unearth political dirt to use against Joe Biden, then for his role in inciting a mob to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Senate declined to convict Trump both times, a maneuver that would have barred him from seeking the presidency again.
Congress, which writes federal budgets, unlike the president, largely rejected deep cuts Trump wanted in his budget last year.
“President Trump promised to reinvest in America’s national security infrastructure, to make sure our nation is safe in a dangerous world,” Russ Vought, the White House budget chief, wrote in a memo accompanying the proposal.
Watchdog groups largely criticized Trump’s proposed defense budget.
“Amid an unauthorized war with Iran, with no clear strategy or long-term resolution in sight, Congress must use its power of the purse to reassert its war authority,” Steve Ellis, president of the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, said in a statement. “Exploding the Pentagon budget will not make us safer. It will explode the debt. It will waste taxpayer dollars on programs that don’t work or that we simply don’t need.”
The U.S. government operates under roughly $2 trillion annual deficits, and the national debt has ballooned beyond $39 trillion.
“Donald Trump might be happy to spend more money on bombs in the Middle East than on families here in America—but I am not,” Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.
In his budget proposal, Trump requested more funding for immigrant detention facilities to pay for beds for 100,000 adults and 30,000 families to be detained together.
The administration is targeting construction of dozens of more immigrant detention sites plus 12,000 new officers.
To justify their budgets for the next fiscal year, agency heads and Cabinet secretaries will testify before Congress in the coming months.
The budget would also cancel $20 billion in already-approved funding from a Biden-era infrastructure law, including renewable energy funding.
It would also eliminate a series of programs and agencies, including the Minority Business Development Agency and Job Corps, which are work-training efforts; the Community Development Block Grant program, a popular funding source within the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and LIHEAP, a public health program that helps millions of low-income renters and homeowners pay utility bills.
“While the Administration proposes a budget, Congress holds the power of the purse,” said Susan Collins, the Republican from Maine who chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, adding that she opposes several of the proposed cuts, including to LIHEAP.
The budget also zeros out funding for the national Weatherization Assistance Program, which helps people make energy-efficiency upgrades and save money on their power bills, and cuts funding for WIC, the food program for women, infants and children.
