A Republican Budget, but Not Exactly What the President Asked For

The $1.3 trillion spending plan passed Thursday by the Republican-led House delivered a broad rebuke to President Donald Trump’s vision for shaking up government, ignoring many of his ideas for cutting domestic programs and, in some cases, expressly barring him from accomplishing his goals.

Last year, in his first budget request for fiscal 2018, Trump envisioned a drastic reordering of government priorities, in which a large increase in military spending would be matched by deep cuts to foreign aid, the diplomatic corps, education, environmental cleanup and other domestic programs — many of which he would eliminate.

The bill now heads to the Senate. Here’s a breakdown of what’s in it and what it means.

The package that will arrive on Trump’s desk this week for what he has conceded will be a grudging signature contains a sizable increase for the military but few of the reductions he had sought. It reflects the triumph of politically palatable bipartisan deals for lawmakers who are preparing to face voters in midterm elections over the audacious promises of a president who has styled himself as a change agent, but has been unable to persuade a Congress controlled by his own party.

The “big, beautiful wall”? Not this year. Deep cuts to environmental programs, clean energy initiatives and biomedical research? Congress said no, thanks. Zeroing out federal arts programs? Lawmakers gave them a modest increase.

“Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment,” Trump said on Twitter this week, venting his frustration about the bill, which he briefly threatened to torpedo on Wednesday in the final hours before it was unveiled.

The administration sought to put the best face on the measure Thursday, highlighting the large military funding increase and spending on the president’s priorities — immigration enforcement, school safety, infrastructure and combating opioid abuse — even as his top advisers conceded it fell short of what they had sought.

“In order to get the defense spending, primarily, but all the rest of our priorities funded, we had to give away a lot of stuff that we didn’t want to give away,” said Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the top Senate Democrat, argued that the president was simply outnegotiated.

“He either won’t take yes for an answer, or he’s not allowed to take yes for an answer,” Schumer said in an interview. “The fact that they really were not negotiating in a realistic way gave us much more room to accomplish what we wanted to.”

Nowhere was the dynamic on more vivid display than on Trump’s cherished proposal to spend tens of billions of dollars on a wall on the nation’s border with Mexico.

The bill includes nearly $1.6 billion for border security — including new technology and repairs to existing barriers — but not Trump’s wall, as he claimed on Twitter on Wednesday. That includes $641 million for about 33 miles of fencing that was previously authorized under the 2006 Secure Fence Act, passed during the George W. Bush administration. But the measure prohibits building a concrete wall or other prototypes the president has considered, and allocates the rest of the funding for new aircraft, sensors and surveillance technology.

The measure also explicitly rejects Trump’s plan for a hiring spree of border officers, an idea critics have condemned as an attempt to unleash a “deportation force.” The president signed an executive order during his first week in office last year calling for 10,000 additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, and he sought 2,000 in his budget request. The bill caps the number at 65.

The measure bars funding for some school choice measures, including private school vouchers, a signature issue for Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary. And the bill rejected DeVos’ efforts to shrink her department’s spending; it increased the education budget by $3.9 billion.

“After more than a year on the job, I would have hoped Secretary DeVos would have learned by now that her extreme ideas to privatize our nation’s public schools and dismantle the Department of Education do not have support among parents or in Congress, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the education committee. “I’m proud to have worked with Republicans in Congress to flatly reject these ideas.”

Congress increased the budget of two K-12 programs DeVos had sought to eliminate — one that pays for after-school programs for 1.8 million low-income students and another that helps schools fund mental health services and violence-prevention initiatives. The spending plan also reversed cuts to programs that helped low-income college students, such as the federal work-study program that DeVos had sought to halve.

Public charter schools, which DeVos has championed and are generally supported across party lines, received a funding boost.

The Environmental Protection Agency was one of the few parts of the government that did not receive a substantial spending bump in the package, but the measure kept funding for the agency essentially flat at $8.1 billion, rejecting the 30 percent cut sought by Trump and Scott Pruitt, the administrator. Activists saw that as a victory.

“We regard this bill as being a solid repudiation of the Trump-Pruitt efforts to eviscerate the agency’s budget,” said Elgie Holstein, senior director for strategic planning at the Environmental Defense Fund. At the same time, he said the agency was operating at funding levels lower than in President Ronald Reagan’s final year in office, calling its funding level a “long-term starvation diet.”

The agency has lost hundreds of employees to buyouts and retirements over the past year. In addition to keeping overall funding at 2017 levels, Congress blocked a giant reduction in staffing by wiping out a proposed $60 million for “workforce reshaping.” That money would have gone toward more buyouts and a reorganization that could have included shrinking or shuttering regional EPA offices.

And while Trump sought deep cuts to Energy Department programs focused on developing the next generation of clean energy technologies, such as advanced batteries or carbon capture for power plants, the measure substantially increased them.

Trump had proposed cutting the department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by 69 percent; Congress instead increased funding 14 percent. He had sought to eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which funds research into long-shot energy technologies like algae biofuels; the measure increases its budget 16 percent. Programs for basic science, nuclear power, advanced manufacturing and fossil fuels also received double-digit percentage increases.

Lawmakers also saved pet regional programs Trump had targeted for elimination. Those include $300 million for cleaning up toxic sediment from the Great Lakes and $73 million to restore the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The inspector general’s office, which is investigating Pruitt’s extensive first-class travel, also avoided the budget ax and maintained the previous year’s level of $41.5 million.

In his budget blueprint for 2018, Trump proposed defunding the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Instead, Congress provided $153 million for each agency, an increase of $3 million in each case over 2017.

Lawmakers also rebuffed Trump’s proposal to eliminate funds for the popular Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, providing $3.6 billion, an increase of $250 million over 2017.

Congress ignored Trump’s plan to reduce the State Department’s budget by about 30 percent — with huge cuts to basic diplomacy, support for the United Nations and a vast medicine-buying program begun by George W. Bush that allows millions of Africans with HIV to survive. Instead, the bill provides $54 billion for the department, a modest cut from 2017, keeping HIV funding level.

Congress also rejected Trump’s proposal for a $7.5 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health, the medical research agency, providing a total of $37 billion, an increase of $3 billion from 2017.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development received a $4.7 billion overall funding boost, instead of the $6 billion reduction the president sought.

The agency’s $52.7 billion budget included significant increases to programs Trump had proposed cutting or killing, including community development block grants, the HOME program for affordable housing and a 42 percent increase in money to repair the nation’s crumbling public housing infrastructure, a program the president planned to virtually eliminate.

The most important addition was an increase of $1.25 billion for the department’s core rental assistance programs.