President Donald Trump is preparing a “security budget” that will ramp up spending for the Pentagon while slashing funding for most other federal agencies.
Trump plans to increase defense spending by $54 billion per year, which would be a 10% increase. He’d cut funding for most other agencies by $54 billion to keep his overall budget from adding to the national debt. “Most federal programs will see a reduction,” an official with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told reporters on Monday.
Trump has made no secret of his desire to scale back regulatory agencies, especially the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But such agencies tend to have modest budgets compared with the cost of military troops and hardware. The EPA’s entire budget is around $8 billion, for instance. That’s only two-thirds the cost of a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, which comes with a price tag of about $13 billion.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-plans-to-cut-funding-for-most-government-agencies-160756646.html