President Trump announced on Wednesday that the fiscal 2020 budget request for national defense will be $700 billion, a drop of $16 billion from the previous year but above the levels of the past few years.

“We know what the new budget is for the Defense Department; it will probably be $700 billion,” Trump told reporters during a Cabinet meeting at which he asked his secretaries to cut their next budget submissions by 5 percent. “So, it was 700, 716, that’s a very substantial number, but it’s defense, it’s very important, to us without defense, maybe the rest of it doesn’t mean very much.”