The White House will release its budget for fiscal year 2020 Monday morning, and in doing so will double down on the border wall fight with even more unrealistic demands. Trump wants $8.6 billion in new funding, beyond the $6.7 billion he's yanking out from other programs with his "emergency."
That's 6 percent more than he's gotten from Congress for the past two years, and well more than the $5 billion he originally demanded. Mexico is still not paying for it. He also would increase defense spending, immigration enforcement, veterans' health care, and opioid addiction programs, but slash pretty much everything else. The budget cuts non-defense spending even below the budget caps Congress set for this fiscal year by an average of 5 percent. It proposes $2.7 trillion in budget cuts over the next 10 years, which is still not enough to close the Trump-sized hole the tax cuts have created.
To get around the caps set on defense spending by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Trump administration proposes funneling the money through the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, more traditionally used for emergencies. That's put even the conservative Heritage Foundation in opposition, calling the budgetary sleight of hand "a gimmick." So Trump would sacrifice pretty much everything else, including ''$1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, over $500 billion from food, housing, and student loan programs, and over $200 billion from federal retirements programs and the U.S. Postal Service," for his wall and his military toys.
This budget won't go anywhere. It's as radical as his previous budget that was flat-out rejected by a Republican Congress; a Democratic House will make short work of it. But by escalating his demands for a wall to a total of $17 billion, he's setting up another government shutdown fight for this fall. This time, however, the debt limit will be in play, too, since the Treasury's ability to shuffle accounts around to meet those obligations will end in September.