Trump's budget set to spark another battle with Democrats in Congress

WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump's 2020 budget proposal released on Monday is unlikely to pass in the Democrat-controlled House and so is set to spark another major battle, experts have said.

The knock-down, drag-out fight between Democrats and the White House, with no compromise on the horizon, they said.

The plan comes after a recent fight between Trump and Democrats over the funding of a border wall which led to an unprecedented partial shutdown of the federal government. This latest plan requests more funding for the border wall and proposes spending cuts in medical care programs.

"The president seeks to slash domestic spending in order to reduce the budget deficit generated by his tax cut," said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Trump's proposal, titled "Budget for a Better America", comprises large domestic spending cuts, including an $845 million cut for Medicare, the federal healthcare program for the elderly.

It also involves a revamp of Medicaid, the joint state-federal medical program for low-income people. Overall, the plan aims to slash $241 billion in spending over the next decade.

West said he expects the Democrats to charge that budget cuts will "hurt poor people in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy".

There are "many things in it that are harmful to working class voters and very few, if any, Democrats will find appealing", he said.

"President Trump hurt millions of Americans and caused widespread chaos when he recklessly shut down the government to try to get his expensive and ineffective wall," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a joint statement with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday. "The same thing will repeat itself if he tries this again. We hope he learned his lesson."

Border wall

To add fuel to the coming fire, Trump's proposal contains items sure to send sparks flying.

Trump is requesting $8.6 billion in funding for a border wall between the United States and Mexico - a signal that the president is not backing down from his demand to build the wall that he has insisted is necessary to stem the massive tide of illegal immigration.

Acting White House budget director Russell Vought said on Monday that border security is "deteriorating by the day", and pointed a finger at Democrats for continuing to refuse the president's requests to fund the wall.

The White House has cited criminal gangs infiltrating the US through the porous southern border. The wall is also seen as a measure to curb the inflow of illegal immigrants, which many white, working-class Trump supporters have blamed for driving down blue-collar wages.

"It is very hard for me to see a Democratic House agreeing to fund a border wall, and it is hard for me to see Trump being willing to accept, say, funding for border fencing in a few high-traffic areas of the border as a replacement," said Christopher Galdieri, a politics professor at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.

The budget proposal also came at a time when Washington's spending is seen by many to be out of control, with interest payments running sky high.

"Trump is acknowledging that the national debt is a big problem," Republican strategist and TV news personality Ford O'Connell said.

However, Dan Mahaffee, senior vice-president at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, said: "Neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to be concerned about debt and deficits, as the president's plan also pushes balanced budgets further into the future."

Galdieri said the White House "still does not seem to have internalized the fact that they did so badly in the 2018 midterms and that the Democrats now have a major role in the budget".

"But they do seem to recognize how central the idea of a border wall has been to Trump's supporters since the start of his campaign," he added.

Xinhua

(China Daily 03/13/2019 page12)