Defying Congress, Trump Plans to Renew Fight for Border Wall Funding

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump, undaunted by perhaps the most bruising defeat of his tenure, plans to kick off a fresh effort Monday to pressure Congress to pay for a wall along the southwestern border, most likely setting up another showdown with Democrats who have vowed to block his signature project.

Trump, who failed to extract even a single extra dollar for his wall during a winter battle that shut down parts of the federal government for a record 35 days, will request $8.6 billion in the annual budget proposal, aides said. He will also ask Congress for another $3.6 billion to replenish military construction funds he has diverted to begin work on the wall by declaring a national emergency, for a total of $12.2 billion.

“I would just say that the whole issue of the wall and border security is of paramount importance,” said Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser. “We have a crisis down there.” Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Kudlow acknowledged that “there will be” a fight over the issue in Congress.

That may be an understatement. Just as Trump has relentlessly made the wall his highest domestic priority as he gears up for a re-election bid next year, Democrats who took control in the House in January have made it a litmus test of their determination to stand up to his immigration policies.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, did not even wait for the new wall request to reach Capitol Hill before declaring it dead on arrival Sunday.

“Congress refused to fund his wall, and he was forced to admit defeat and reopen the government,” they said in a joint statement. “The same thing will repeat itself if he tries this again. We hope he learned his lesson.”

The budget Trump will send Congress on Monday will serve more as a statement of values and a vehicle for political positioning than a plausible outline for how the government will actually raise and spend money in the 2020 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Aside from the proposed wall funding, administration officials said, the president will call for a sizable increase in military spending and significant cuts in domestic programs, neither of which Democrats are likely to accept.

Trump’s fiscal plan will also indicate that he will not balance the budget during his presidency even if he wins a second term, despite his campaign promise not only to eliminate the annual deficit but to pay off the entire national debt accumulated over generations as well. His budget blueprint promises a balanced budget only in 15 years, long after he will have left office, aides said, and even that is predicated on growth estimates that seem unrealistically inflated to independent economists.

At a time when most economic forecasters see growth slowing in the United States and around the world, the budget projects U.S. growth will actually rise this year — to 3.2 percent, up from 2.9 percent for 2018. That is nearly a full percentage point higher than the 2.3 percent forecast by the Federal Reserve.

Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said Sunday that administration economists expected continued boosts to growth this year from the $1.5 trillion in tax cuts that Trump signed in 2017, including further increases in labor force participation by older workers.

Other economists have criticized the sustained forecast of 3 percent growth over a decade as overly optimistic. Hassett defended it by pointing to the administration’s forecast for last year, which was only slightly above the actual growth rate. “We have the same forecast we had last year,” Hassett said, “because we got last year precisely correct.”

The budget is the first of Trump’s tenure to theoretically adhere to spending caps that Congress adopted under President Barack Obama, only to bust in the years since. But Trump accomplishes this only through budgetary legerdemain by pushing much of his 4.7 percent military spending increase out of the regular budget and into an account called Overseas Contingency Operations that has been used mainly to finance wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and has therefore been exempt from congressional caps.

At the same time, domestic discretionary programs would be cut 5 percent, an idea certain to go nowhere with Democrats. Trump is hoping to avoid a repeat of last year’s budget deal, in which he was forced to agree to major domestic spending increases to secure his military boost. But he has even less sway now than he did last year, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

The overseas operations fund would receive $165 billion, compared with $69 billion this year, even as Trump is scaling back military operations in Afghanistan and Syria. The last time the fund had so much money was in the 2010 fiscal year, when the United States had nearly seven times as many troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Among those who have criticized the overseas operations budget category as a “slush fund” is Mick Mulvaney, a Republican former congressman who served as Trump’s first budget director and is the acting White House chief of staff.

On the wall, the president seems more intent on proving to conservatives his commitment to building it than to finding a compromise with Democrats. Administration officials said the new $8.6 billion Trump is seeking would enable him to complete the project, with a total of 700 miles of barriers, most of it new, though with some sections refurbished. Trump, who spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, golfing and raising a reported $7 million for the coming elections, lashed out at Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator who has accused him of giving up too much on the wall.

“Wacky Nut Job @AnnCoulter, who still hasn’t figured out that, despite all odds and an entire Democrat Party of Far Left Radicals against me (not to mention certain Republicans who are sadly unwilling to fight), I am winning on the Border,” he wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

“Major sections of Wall are being built and renovated,” he added, “with MUCH MORE to follow shortly. Tens of thousands of illegals are being apprehended (captured) at the Border and NOT allowed into our Country. With another President, millions would be pouring in. I am stopping an invasion as the Wall gets built.”

In December, Trump refused to accept $1.375 billion for barriers along the border — though not steel or concrete walls — and demanded that Congress instead give him $5.7 billion, resulting in the partial government shutdown that left agencies closed and 800,000 workers without pay.

After five weeks, he gave in and agreed to reopen the government without concessions by the Democrats. The spending deal that ultimately passed both the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate included just the $1.375 billion he had originally turned down.

He signed grudgingly but then declared a national emergency to justify raiding $3.6 billion from a military construction fund for wall money. Relying on a president’s more traditional authority to move money around in limited ways, he also diverted another $3.1 billion from counternarcotics programs and an asset forfeiture fund. Combined with the $1.375 billion, that gave him about $8 billion for border barriers.

Democrats and some Republicans objected to the national emergency declaration on the grounds that Trump was abusing the Constitution by appropriating money that Congress had explicitly refused to spend for that purpose. The House has voted to overturn his declaration, and enough Republicans have signaled that they will join Democrats to do the same in the Senate, presumably prompting what would be the first veto of Trump’s presidency. Critics do not have enough votes to override his veto, but lawsuits have been filed seeking to block his move.

The budget to be unveiled Monday would backfill the $3.6 billion from military construction projects, but officials did not say whether the other diverted money would be restored.

Given the anger on the left over the national emergency declaration, it seemed hard to imagine that Democrats would agree to sanction it by reimbursing the money he took. “This ridiculous request, like the rest of the Trump budget, is not even worth the paper it’s written on,” said Rep. Nita M. Lowey, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee.