The White House will pitch a big increase for defense spending in fiscal 2018, while other parts of the federal government will have to “do more with less,” President Donald Trump said Monday.
“This defense spending increase will be offset and paid for by finding greater savings and efficiencies across the federal government,” Trump said during a televised address to U.S. governors at the White House during the National Governors Association’s 2017 winter meeting.
The administration will propose a $54-billion increase for defense programs, a White House Office of Management and Budget official said during a Monday morning conference call with reporters. Trump has said his administration’s formal budget request will be sent to Capitol Hill by the middle of this month.
For scale, the entire Energy Department has an annualized budget of just over $30 billion for the 2017 fiscal year. All told, the rebalance proposed by Trump this week would result in about a 10-percent cut to federal non-defense discretionary spending, using budget figures compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for 2016: the latest year for which complete data are available.
Applied across the board to DOE programs, that would leave Cold War nuclear cleanup managed by the Office of Environmental Management (EM) with a 2018 budget of just over $5.5 billion, down from 2017’s annualized level of more than $6 billion.
Although not part of the Pentagon’s annual budget, Trump has voiced support for active nuclear weapons programs managed by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA’s fiscal 2017 budget is about $12.5 billion, on an annualized basis. One source familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking has said the White House plans to protect this budget.
Total discretionary federal spending, the category to which both DOE and defense spending belong, was about $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2016.
One former DOE official speculated the White House would propose across-the-board cuts for DOE EM: something other administrations have attempted, only to run up against both career agency officials who point out how short-term cuts might spell long-term expenses at cleanup sites across the nation, and powerful lawmakers who vigilantly protect legacy nuclear cleanups in their states and districts.
The budget request the White House releases each year “is rarely the budget you end up with,” the former official said.
Congress, which writes annual appropriations bills, has final say on federal spending. The next budget year begins on Oct. 1.
A key House appropriator from Trump’s own part has already balked at the proposed cuts to civilian agencies.
Asked by Politico about hypothetical spending bills that cut non-defense spending by 10 percent or more, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said: “I think you’d see even appropriators voting against those bills.”
Simpson chairs the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, which writes the first draft of the Energy Department’s annual spending bill each year.
A spokesperson for Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, did not reply to a request for comment this week.