Yesterday, President Trump released his fiscal year 2019 budget plan. The president’s annual budget request tells Congress how much money the president thinks the Federal government should spend on public needs and programs; tells Congress how much money the president thinks the government should take in through taxes and other sources of revenue; and tells Congress how large a deficit or surplus would result from the president’s proposal.
Here are seven figures from the proposal you should know:
1. Overall spending and revenues: The budget asks for $4.407 trillion of expenditures while forecasting $3.422 trillion in revenue, leaving an anticipated deficit of just under $1 trillion.
2. Defense Spending: The budget proposes a defense discretionary spending level of $716 billion in FY 2019, including a shift of $20 billion of Overseas Contingency Operations funding to the base budget. This change results in a revised FY 2019 national defense discretionary base budget level of $64 7 billion and a revised OCO level of $69 billion.
3. Non-Defense Spending: The budget proposes $540 billion in non-defense spending, $75 billion above the current FY 2019 Budget, $10 billion above the pre-Balanced Budget Act of spending of approximately $530 billion set in the 2019 Sequestration Preview Report, and $57 billion below the new cap.
4. Opioids and Mental Health: The budget proposes an additional $10 billion in discretionary funding to address the opioid epidemic and serious mental illness.
5. Job Training: The budget proposes an additional $1.5 billion for workforce development grants at the Department of Labor.
6. Border Security and Immigration Enforcement: The budget proposes $23.1 billion in border security and immigration enforcement, including $2.2 billion in investments in border security technology.
7. Economic Growth: The budget assumes the economy will expand at an annual rate of 3 percent (the actual rate for the past decade has been about 2 percent).
