Mounting signs suggest that the forthcoming Trump budget may contain cuts harsher than those in House GOP budgets of recent years, which themselves would have slashed programs and services across much of the budget.

The budget that the Republican majority on the House Budget Committee approved last spring, for example, contained a stunning $6 trillion in domestic cuts over ten years, shrinking spending outside Social Security, Medicare, and interest payments to just 7 percent of gross domestic product by 2026. That’s less than three-fifths its average level over the past 40 years and little more than half its average level under President Reagan. The budget would have slashed non-defense discretionary programs (which include everything outside defense and entitlement programs) by roughly $1 trillion over ten years below the already austere levels set by the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) and the automatic “sequestration” cuts. [Last spring’s Republican budget] would have caused tens of millions of people to lose basic support, yet those unprecedented cuts may not be enough for the Trump Administration. And it would have cut programs for people with low or modest incomes by roughly $3.7 trillion over the decade, cutting them 42 percent by 2026 and thereby causing tens of millions of people of limited means to lose basic support.[1]

Yet those unprecedented cuts may not be enough for the Trump Administration. The Hill reported recently that members of the Trump team were meeting with career staff at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to assemble a budget with $10 trillion or more in savings (including interest savings), of which about $8½ trillion would apparently be cuts to programs outside defense (the rest would be interest savings). Many of the cuts in the Trump team’s blueprint come from plans that the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee (RSC) issued last year, according to The Hill. The Heritage report called for more than $8½ trillion in non-defense cuts (slightly over $10 trillion in savings when the effects on interest payments are taken into account; see box), while the RSC report called for almost $7½ trillion in such cuts.

Moreover, the “Penny Plan” that President Trump proposed during his campaign would slash non-defense discretionary funding by 2026 to an amount 37 percent below the 2010 level, adjusted for inflation, and nearly 40 percent below its lowest level under Ronald Reagan, when measured as a share of the economy.[2] Rep. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s nominee for OMB director, supports the Penny Plan.[3]

Cuts of these magnitudes would have devastating effects on tens of millions of less fortunate families and on an array of basic services that middle-income Americans, as well, rely on. State and local governments, too, would be sharply affected, since a large share of federal domestic programs operate as grants to states and localities, which deliver basic services such as education, highways and mass transit, child nutrition, rental subsidies, clean water, and health care through Medicaid.

These budget cuts would apparently come alongside deep tax cuts heavily favoring the most well-off. The House GOP’s “Better Way” tax plan issued last year, which the Trump team is reportedly moving toward, would lose $3.1 trillion in revenue over the coming decade, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC).[4] In the first year, 76 percent of these tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent of Americans; by the tenth year, 99 percent of the tax cuts would. Trump proposed an even larger, regressive tax cut in his campaign.

As a result, the forthcoming Trump budget is likely to represent the largest Robin Hood-in-reverse proposal from any President in modern U.S. history, shifting substantial amounts of income from people of modest means to those who already possess enormous wealth.