Your Daily Dose of Trump and His Administration News
- The administration will seek a 6 percent cut in non-defense spending, breaking from a bipartisan spending agreement inked in August. The Trump budget includes $740.5 billion in proposed defense spending, but just $590 billion for domestic spending, which includes cuts to everything from health and education to transportation and foreign policy.
- Trump wants to slash Medicare and Medicaid spending in his proposed $4.8 trillion budget beginning in October. The president will seek to eliminate up to $4.6 trillion in red ink forecast over a decade, but will not propose to balance the budget, believing that deficits on his watch are “manageable,” especially with the current low interest rates.
- Trump will request $28.9 billion for the Pentagon to modernize nuclear delivery systems and $19.8 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration — a nearly 20 percent increase over his previous budget request to “modernize” the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
- President Donald Trump posted a tweet on Saturday vowing that “We will not be touching your Social Security and Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget.” Trump is doing exactly that with his budget proposal. Trump’s budget includes “steep reductions in social-safety-net programs,” including cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
- Trump will propose a 12 percent boost in spending for NASA, where he’s created a Space Force and wants to see the United States compete militarily with China and Russia in space.
- Trump falsely told governors Monday that the US was paying “everything…close to 100%” of NATO before he took office. The US covers an agreed-upon 22% of the actual NATO budget.
- Trump also falsely told governors Monday morning: “European Union was really formed so they could treat us badly, so they’ve done their job.” The European Union and its precursor was formed with the support of the United States.
- Amazon says President Trump’s bias against company founder Jeff Bezos “is a matter of public record” as it seeks to depose the president in its legal battle to overturn a Pentagon decision to award a huge cloud-computing contract to Microsoft.
- Trump speaking on the coronavirus: “A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat. As the heat comes in. Typically that will go away in April. We’re in great shape, though.”
- Trump suggested he’d like to model American criminal law on drug dealing on authoritarian systems like China, where dealers are executed: “Countries with a powerful death penalty, with a fair but quick trial, they have very little if any drug problem. That includes China.”
- Trump’s head of the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, says it is now policy that BLM law officers will defer to self-proclaimed “constitutionalist” county sheriffs who have vowed not to enforce federal environmental laws on public lands.
- The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit Monday that seeks to overturn restrictions on when New Jersey police can cooperate with federal immigration officers. Trump’s administration had already joined a similar suit last month. Both complaints target rules created two years ago by New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal that limit what police can share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. The “Immigrant Trust Directive” restricts when police can turn unauthorized immigrants over for deportation, although it does not prohibit cooperation completely.
- Trump waived the Native American Graves Protection Act to allow blasting for construction of the border wall in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a Unesco recognised natural reserve.
The Past 24 Hours Or So 