Director of the office of management and budget Mick Mulvaney (L) and treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin (R) with US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on Tuesday.(Reuters Photo)
US President Donald Trump will unveil his first government budget in mid-March, a keystone statement of his priorities for the coming years, the White House said on Wednesday.
The nearly four trillion dollar annual federal budget is a declaration of intent that puts the president’s policy goals down in black and white.
It also separates affordable campaign promises from the fanciful and is the final arbitrator after turf wars between departments and powerful interest groups.
“We’ll have something in mid-March,” said White House spokesmanc. Trump huddled with budget advisors early on Wednesday to rake through the proposals.
At the meeting Trump repeated his campaign rhetoric about cutting waste and renegotiating federal contracts. “The finances of this country are a mess but we are going to clean that up,” he said.
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US president after US president has made similar promises on coming to office, before delving into a text that runs in the thousands of pages and tossing the plan into the thicket of Congress.
Trump has oodles of campaign promises to pay for, but faces a national debt set to hit $20 trillion on his watch and a deficit at 3.1% of GDP and rising.
Trump’s promises -- from building a wall on the Mexican border to deporting undocumented immigrants -- carry an estimated price tag of $5.3 trillion, according to the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Trump tried to give himself some cover for criticism of the upcoming plan.
“We are going to take this budget, which is in all fairness I’ve only been here for four weeks, so I can’t take too much of the blame for what’s happened but it is absolutely out of control,” Trump said.
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