Trump Will Detail His Budget Plan Thursday:There Will Be Some Severe Cuts: 28% for the State Department and 31% for the E.P.A., But...

..he is going to spend the savings on the military and on domestic federal enforcement activities.

Trump’s budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year would slash the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent and cut State Department spending by a similar amount, according to congressional staff members familiar with the plan, reports the New York Times.

The budget outline, to be unveiled on Thursday, is more of a broad political statement than a detailed plan for spending and taxation notes the paper. But it represents  Trump’s first real effort to translate his bold but vague campaign themes into the minutiae of governance. The president would funnel $54 billion in additional funding into defense programs and beef up immigration enforcement.

Yet for all its headline-grabbing bold strokes — and the White House claims that it will reset the process of Washington policy making — major elements of the plan have already been declared dead on arrival by the Republican leadership in Congress, and much of the fiscal fine print will be filled in by Capitol Hill lawmakers and their aides over the next month.

The plan to be released at 7 a.m. tomorrow is a “skinny budget,” a pared-down first draft of the line-by-line appropriations request submitted by first-term administrations during their first few months. A broader budget will be released later in the spring that will include Trump’s proposals for taxation as well as the bulk of government spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs.

In addition to the cuts at the E.P.A. and the State Department, Trump’s team is expected to propose a wide array of cuts to public education, to transportation programs like Amtrak and to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including the complete elimination of the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds popular programs like Meals on Wheels, housing assistance and other community assistance efforts.

  -RW