Rare
Casey Given
03/21/2017
Last week, the Trump administration released their “skinny budget,” outlining the president’s ideal levels of discretionary spending for federal agencies. The plan sent shockwaves through Washington, pledging major cuts to bureaucracies big and small. The slashes are so sweeping that it seems unlikely to pass even a Republican-controlled Congress, with Sen. Lindsay Graham describing the budget as “dead on arrival.”
Although the proposed cuts are widespread, they are by no means universal. One agency that would be exempt from any sort of fiscal discipline is the Department of Defense. Trump’s budget would allocate $639 billion to Defense for fiscal year 2018. That’s $54 billion more than the current year, a 10 percent increase.
