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President Donald Trump said at a Fox News town-hall forum last week that he wanted to reduce funding for entitlement programs in a bid to cut the national debt.

"Oh, we'll be cutting," he said. "We're also going to have growth like you've never seen before."

The move would be a shift from Trump's pledge to leave social safety net programs untouched, such as Social Security and Medicare.

The Trump administration had already signaled it was willing to reduce government spending on those programs in its latest budget proposal.

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President Donald Trump said at a Fox News town-hall forum last week that he was willing to cut entitlement programs to reduce the federal debt.

Trump was asked about the $23 trillion national debt on Thursday, which has continued to surge under his watch. He campaigned in 2016 on wiping it out but has enacted laws that piled on at least $4.7 trillion more onto the debt throughout his presidency, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

During the forum, Fox News host Martha MacCallum suggested to the president that if "you don't cut something in entitlements, you will never really deal with the debt."

"Oh, we'll be cutting," he told the audience in Scranton, Pennsylvania. "We're also going to have growth like you've never seen before."

That would be a shift from a previous campaign pledge to protect entitlement programs, which are commonly understood to include those like Social Security and Medicare. His administration had already signaled it was willing to reduce government spending on those programs.

Trump's latest budget proposal called for $130 billion less to be spent on prescription drugs under Medicare and a $70 billion cut resulting from constricted eligibility rules for Social Security disability benefits, The Wall Street Journal reported. It's unlikely to become law though.

Less than a day after the Fox News forum, Trump tweeted in defense of his record, saying he would "protect" both Social Security and Medicare.

It's not the first time he walked back similar remarks about slashing federal expenditures on social safety-net programs. The president also opened the door to cutting entitlement spending in a CNBC interview back in February.

"At the right time, we will take a look at that. You know, that's actually the easiest of all things, if you look," Trump told CNBC's Joe Kernen when asked about possible cuts. The president rowed back on those comments.

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Social Security and Medicare represent a major chunk of government spending; they constituted almost 40% of the federal budget in 2018. Social Security alone makes up nearly a quarter of all federal spending.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that both programs will cost $30 trillion over the next decade.

But any Republican-led effort to reform those safety-net programs would likely encounter resistance from Democrats who have pledged to shield Social Security and Medicare from cuts.

Correction: The article has been amended to include additional context about the president's remarks at the Fox News town hall. Trump didn't specifically refer to Social Security and Medicare at the time, only that he would be willing to reduce federal spending on entitlement programs.

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