President Trump plans to cut foreign aid as part of his first budget request to Congress, the White House announced Monday.
“We are taking his words and turning them into policies and dollars,” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters. “So we will be spending less overseas and spending more back home.”
Trump’s budget will call for a $54 billion increase in defense spending over the Budget Control Act level set for fiscal 2018, offset by a $54 billion cut to other discretionary federal government spending. With veterans’ benefits exempted from those cuts, that amounts to a 12 percent reduction in the other spending in fiscal 2018. “It’s the largest proposed reduction since the early years of the Reagan administration,” Mulvaney said.
Foreign aid accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending — $42.4 billion — under the budget for this fiscal year. But Mulvaney emphasized the foreign aid cuts throughout his remarks, saying they exemplify Trump’s determination to fulfill his campaign promises.
“The president [is] keeping his promises and doing exactly what he said he was going to do,” Mulvaney said. “It reduces money that we give to other nations, it reduces duplicative programs, and it eliminates programs that don’t work.”
The foreign aid cuts will be part of a reduction in spending that reportedly could reduce the State Department’s budget by as much as 30 percent. The details of those cuts won’t be clear until after the White House gets feedback from the federal agencies on how to implement the reductions and submits the revised budget request to Congress.
“We’ll spend the next week or so working on a final budget blueprint,” Mulvaney said. “[The agencies] may come back to us and say, ‘yeah, we think that’s a good way to reach that number’ or they may come back to us with other suggestions.”
