Monday, the Trump administration revealed parts of its 2017 budget proposal. According to The Washington Post, “the defense budget will increase by 10 percent. Trump will also request $30 billion in supplementary military spending for the fiscal year 2017…”
The Post adds that according to an official, the administration wants to boost “defense-related spending” by “$54 billion while cutting other federal agencies by the same amount.”
Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Budget and Management, said the administration is making good on President Trump’s campaign promises:
“We are taking his words and turning them into policies and dollars…It reduces money to other nations, eliminates duplicative programs, and eliminates programs that just don’t work.”
Trump won’t be making any cuts to entitlement programs, which make up the bulk of government spending. Sunday, during an interview with Fox News, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said of entitlements: “We are not touching those now. So don’t expect to see that as part of this budget, OK?”
Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump promised to stay away from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
In March 2013, Trump told the crowd at CPAC: “As Republicans, if you think you are going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you are going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen.”
In February, 2016, he slammed Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has pushed desperately for entitlement reform, saying: “…he represented cutting entitlements, etc, etc. The only one that’s not going to cut is me.”
In March 2016, Trump said: “I will do everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is…I want to leave Social Security as is, I want to make our country rich again so we can afford it.”
Trump also said the following in March 2016: “You know, Paul wants to knock out Social Security, knock it down–way down. He wants to knock Medicare way down. And, frankly–well, two things. Number one, you’re going to lose the election if you’re going to do that…We have to do what is right, but you will lose the election if you do that.
But more importantly, in a sense, I want to keep it. These people have been making their payments for their whole lives. I want to keep Social Security intact. Now, I want to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. I want to do a lot of things to it that are going to make it much better, actually. But I’m not going to cut it, and I’m not going to raise ages, and I’m not going to do all of the things that they want to do. But they want to really cut it, and they want to cut it.”
Just prior to the election, Trump said: “I am going to protect and save your Social Security and your Medicare…”
One has to go pretty far back to find a time when Donald Trump dared to speak about changes to Social Security, or entitlement programs. In his book, The America We Deserve, published in 2000, he wrote of “personal Social Security accounts.”
In short, although Donald Trump is a post-ideological president, and moreover, a man whose policy prescriptions have shifted multiple times over the course of the last two years, no one can credibly claim they are surprised by his refusal to touch entitlements.