The OMB director Mick Mulvaney says officials will be given “a tremendous amount of flexibility.” | Getty Trump budget would pay for military buildup with domestic cuts Everything from heating subsidies for poor families to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be slashed.

The Trump administration is calling for a $54 billion increase in military spending to be paid for with cuts to nearly every domestic department, branding the president’s first official spending proposal a “hard-power budget.”

White House officials said the fiscal year 2018 budget proposal delivers on President Donald Trump’s campaign promises — an “America first” plan intended to impress the nation’s international allies and scare the country’s enemies by building up stockpiles of nuclear weapons and defense equipment.


“A budget that puts America First must make the safety of our people its number one priority — because without safety, there can be no prosperity,” Trump said in the opening lines of the document, released Thursday morning.

The discretionary spending request would cover the costs by gutting everything from alternative energy efforts to a program that helps poor families pay their heating bills, targeting the EPA for its proposal of the most deeply cutting reduction. Under the plan, the EPA would receive $5.7 billion in fiscal 2018 funding, a 31 percent reduction from current levels.

In a break from decades of precedent, Trump's $1.1 trillion fiscal blueprint does not address mandatory spending, which eats up about two-thirds of federal dollars on programs like Medicare and Social Security.

In overall funding, the plan calls for the largest cut to HHS, proposing $65.1 billion, a 20 percent reduction.

The administration has proposed $27.1 billion for the State Department and development programs, a 29 percent reduction. And under the plan, the departments of Agriculture and Labor would both see their budgets slashed by 21 percent — Agriculture coming in at $17.9 billion and Labor at $9.6 billion.

Trump also proposes severing federal support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and eliminating funding for more than a dozen others programs, including the Interagency Council on Homelessness, the the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and the Chemical Safety Board.

Budgets for the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs are the only federal accounts that would come out ahead under the administration's request. The blueprint calls for a total of $574 for DoD, about a 10 percent increase over current levels. DHS would receive $44.1 billion, a 7 percent increase. And the VA would get $78.9 billion, a 6 percent hike.

None of the funding levels should come as a surprise, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said Wednesday.

“You’ll see reductions exactly where you would expect it from a president who just ran on an ‘America First’ campaign,” Mulvaney said. “If he said it on the campaign, it’s in the budget.”

For the EPA, that means proposed reductions in programs “that don’t line up with the president's view on things like global warming and alternative energies," he said.

Many of the programs the administration sees as “duplicative,” Mulvaney said, fall under HUD.

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“We've spent a lot of money on Housing and Urban Development over the last decades without a lot to show for it,” he said. “Certainly there are some successes, but there's a lot of programs that simply cannot justify their existence, and that's where we zeroed in.”

The proposal calls for the elimination of entire programs at HUD, including the Low Income Energy Assistance Program and the Community Services Block Grant program.

Mulvaney said HUD Secretary Ben Carson, as well as other Cabinet secretaries, will have “the flexibility to move money around” with Trump’s permission.

The blueprint does not include a spreadsheet with line-by-line funding proposals. “That’s up to the agencies to implement,” he said.

The Trump administration first handed out spending targets to agencies last month. Since then, leaked budget documents have served as warnings to some programs on the chopping block.

The White House initially floated a 37 percent cut to State Department funding, but Secretary of State Rex Tillerson successfully pushed that down to 29 percent.

On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers said the administration’s wish list would lead to a grueling appropriations process this year.

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who leads the House Appropriations subcommittee on Interior and Environment, said it would be nearly impossible to cut $54 billion out of the shrinking pot of discretionary funds.

“It’s going to be a tough budget," Calvert said Wednesday. "It’s going to be tough on every single appropriator." He added that Congress has already cut spending “significantly,” including a 21 percent reduction in EPA funding, over the last five years.

“We will cut domestic,” he added. “But that’s not going to solve the problem itself. We have to look beyond discretionary spending, beyond any long-term fix.”

In the Senate, Susan Collins (R-Maine) — chairwoman of the subcommittee in charge of funding for transportation and HUD — said there have been “a lot of rumors about eliminating programs that are very important.”

Liberal critics have said Trump’s spending cuts would destroy programs for lower and middle-income Americans, threatening the nation’s progress against poverty and homelessness.

“When we get the full Trump budget, it may well represent the most Robin Hood-in-reverse proposal by any president in modern U.S. history,” Robert Greenstein, the president of the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said ahead of the release.

While steep cuts to departments like the EPA are expected under a Republican president, Trump’s plan leaves out the key conservative priority of deficit reduction.

“If we’re talking about increasing discretionary, as we are, we’ve got to go into entitlement spending or we’re just going to blow through the deficit,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday.

Mulvaney said Wednesday that he can confirm “the president is going to keep the promises” he made on leaving entitlement spending as is.

The OMB director, once among Congress’ toughest deficit hawks, also acknowledged the White House budget leaves the nation’s $488 billion federal deficit untouched. The decision ignores what has become the fiscal gold standard within the GOP: a budget that balances within 10 years.

“This is a budget blueprint, not a complete budget,” Mulvaney said. “You will not see revenue projections, you will not see larger policy statements, and, importantly, you will not see anything having to do with mandatory spending.”

The full White House budget will be rolled out in May, the director said.

Trump’s plan also contains spending priorities for only one year. Previous presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, have released far more detailed documents in their first years, typically with a decade of spending and revenue projections.

Under Trump’s budget, agencies will also be left with open-ended questions about how to achieve those cuts.

Mulvaney said officials will be given “a tremendous amount of flexibility,” adding that the White House has worked with “some of the agencies” to tweak spending levels since the initial “pass-back” proposals were first distributed to each department last month.

In addition to releasing the fiscal 2018 budget document, the Trump administration detailed its fiscal 2017 funding priorities on Thursday and unveiled a $30 billion defense supplemental request, which includes a request of $1.5 billion to jumpstart construction of a wall along the border with Mexico.

The fiscal 2017 proposal calls for a $15 billion cut to nondefense programs this year, as well as a $25 billion increase to military funds. About $5 billion of that defense spending would come partly from the military’s emergency spending fund for overseas contingency operations.

The White House’s hard-line position on spending for the rest of 2017 could make it tough for Congress to pass the still-pending government spending bills due by April 28.