Some would be hit particularly hard, with reductions of more than 20 percent at the Agriculture, Labor and State departments and of more than 30 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency. Among them, the Public Broadcasting Corporation, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Chemical Safety Board, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for National Community Service and the African Development Foundation. Trump is willing to discuss priorities, said White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, a former South Carolina congressman who made a name for himself as a spending hawk before Trump plucked him for his Cabinet. The blueprint is expected to call for taking an ax to programs and agencies that Republicans love to hate like EPA, Energy, Interior, State, HUD and Commerce; foreign aid; the federal workforce; and Education and Labor training programs, while boosting defense spending by roughly $54 billion — and that covers only so-called discretionary spending, which accounts for just a third of the federal government’s budget. Then again, public broadcasters have been through the budget wars many times before and have always received the money that helps them broadcast “Sesame Street” and “All Things Considered.” In fact, no matter the rhetoric or momentary crisis, CPB has often ended up with a slight increase in its federal funding each year. Winfree also wrote Heritage’s budget blueprint in 2016, which has informed much of the administration’s thinking on its budget proposal — although Trump departed from the plan by declining to broach the dismantling of entitlements, except for Medicaid which comes in for big cuts in the House Republican health care bill. is, arguably, the hardest-hit agency under Mr. Trump’s budget proposal: He wants to cut spending by nearly a third — $2.6 billion from its current level of $8.2 billion, according to a person who had been briefed on the proposal but was not authorized to speak publicly about it. (Published Wednesday, March 15, 2017) 
 
 But the National Institutes of Health would absorb a $5.8 billion cut despite Trump's talk in a recent address to Congress of finding "cures to the illnesses that have always plagued us." At the same time, clean-energy research, heavily privileged by the Obama administration, would suffer greatly under the budget with the elimination of the ­ARPA-E program (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) at the Energy Department and an unspecified cut to the agency’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has already said Senate Republicans will not agree to deep cuts to the $50 billion budget for the State Department and United States Agency for International Development initially proposed by the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget. READ MORE: Tillerson calls for "new approach" to North Korea, no details 
 
 "The president wants to spend more money on defence, more money securing the border, more money enforcing the laws, and more money on school choice, without adding to the deficit," Mulvaney told a small group of reporters during a preview on Wednesday. (Published Thursday, March 16, 2017) 
 
 Law enforcement agencies like the FBI would be spared, while the border wall would receive an immediate $1.4 billion infusion in the ongoing fiscal year, with another $2.6 billion planned for the 2018 budget year starting Oct. 1. Trump wants to spend $54 billion more on defence, put a down payment on his border wall, and breathe life into a few other campaign promises.
– President Trump's first budget proposal was officially unveiled Thursday morning—and it delivers exactly what he promised. The proposal—titled "America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again"—contains cuts that the Washington Post says could be the biggest reduction in federal programs since the post-World War II drawdown. The Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department are the hardest-hit agencies according to budget previews, with cuts of around 30%. Military spending would be beefed up by $54 billion under the proposal, $1.5 billion is earmarked for a border wall, and Homeland Security would get a 6.8% funding increase. A roundup of coverage about the $1.15 trillion spending plan: The document is here. Politico reports that the budget is "red meat" for Trump's base, with deep cuts to their most disliked government agencies and programs, though it is also what's known as a "skinny budget" because it is so short on details. A more detailed budget will be out in May. The AP lists winners and losers. The latter group includes the departments of Energy, Labor, and Transportation, along with after-school programs and many independent agencies supported by tax dollars. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney acknowledged that the cuts would lead to job losses, Reuters reports. "You can’t drain the swamp and leave all the people in it," he said during a budget preview Wednesday. He said that White House officials had looked at Trump's campaign speeches, and "turned those policies into numbers." The New York Times reports that congressional Republicans have already declared parts of the plan dead on arrival. "The administration’s budget isn’t going to be the budget," Sen. Marco Rubio told reporters. "We do the budget here. The administration makes recommendations, but Congress does budgets." The Hill notes that such proposals tend to be "little more than guidance" for lawmakers—and that the Senate shot down Obama's 2015 budget 98 to 1. The AP reports that the budget funds Trump's boost for the Pentagon, the biggest since Ronald Reagan's, with cuts to conservative targets including the National Endowment for the Arts, legal aid for the poor, and the AmeriCorps national service program. NBC notes that Trump's proposal, which makes cuts to 12 out of 15 Cabinet agencies, only covers the "discretionary" quarter of the $4 trillion budget for the fiscal year that starts in October. The portion dealing with issues including taxation, Social Security, and Medicare is due in mid-May. The Washington Post reports that the budget proposal's elimination of funding for public broadcasting means that Big Bird's doom has been predicted once again, though public broadcasting has survived previous "zero funding" proposals all the way back to Richard Nixon.