Congress loves to ignore presidential budget requests, and this year, lawmakers are even more eager to dismiss President Trump’s spending blueprint.
“In all the years I’ve been here, there has never been a president’s budget that has passed as submitted, and I don’t think this will be any different,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told reporters as she left the Senate Monday night.
The White House delivered the document to Capitol Hill just days before the Senate is set to rebuke the president for unilaterally redirecting money they designated to military projects to the construction of a southern border wall.
The president’s $4.5 trillion budget calls for a 5 percent cut to domestic spending and more than $8.6 billion for border security and physical barriers along the southwest border.
The budget is a nonstarter with Democrats, but the Senate GOP isn’t enthusiastic either. That’s because the proposal would require deep spending reductions in nearly every department, with the exception of Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs.
“Most of the president’s budgets, and I have been here a while, are mainly suggestions,” said Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who will take the lead on the upcoming spending legislation in the upper chamber. “You know, we look at them. But I don’t know any of them that have been enacted into law.”
Shelby said part of the border security funding that will be added to the fiscal 2020 budget will have to be used to replenish the $3.6 billion Trump plans to take from the military construction budget for a border wall under the authority of a national emergency he declared in February.
The Senate is poised to vote to revoke the national emergency as early as Wednesday, but it won’t stop Trump from redirecting the money. Trump said he will veto that measure and there is not enough GOP opposition to override his veto.
Trump’s unilateral spending move may temper the GOP’s enthusiasm to fight for Trump’s border security funding request in the upcoming spending talks.
Shelby would not guarantee the GOP will call for the same border security funding level in fiscal 2020 spending legislation.
“I’ll try to work with him,” Shelby told the Washington Examiner. “But let’s see what we can do.”
Republicans Monday bristled at the proposed spending cuts. Collins called the more than 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency “deep.”
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, wasn’t happy about the budget’s proposed 15 percent reduction to farm programs, which could impact a five-year farm program authorization bill just recently signed into law.
“The proposal is a proposal,” Roberts said.
