Trump's budget built on proposals to please his conservative base in election year, Democrats claim

The White House will propose a spending plan today that sets up election-year clashes with Congress over proposed cuts to social safety programmes and funding for Donald Trump's proposed border wall - all of which are opposed by House Democrats.

The president's fiscal year 2021 budget blueprint amounts to an election-year messaging document and a map for Mr Trump's second-term priorities, should he secure a second term come November.

The spending plan is expected to be vintage Trump. It advances some campaign promises while contradicting the president himself on some domestic programmes. It ignores a spending agreement with Congress. And it suggests Mr Trump again plans to take billions from a military he says former President Barack Obama underfunded and he has had to "rebuild" and shift those monies to his border barrier project.

Just how much stock to put into the document is murky. Any White House's spending plan is considered mostly a restatement of its policy priorities, since it is Congress that has constitutional authorities to spend taxpayer monies. And Mr Trump has never shown much interest in his budget proposals.

While other presidents have given speeches to explain their spending plans or gotten out of the Beltway to sell the blueprints to voters, Mr Trump has never done so. In fact, in January he appeared to shrug off Washington's annual "budget day" ritual.

"Who the hell cares about the budget?" the president is heard saying to a group of supporters at a January fundraiser, according to a recording of the private event that was obtained by the Washington Post. "We're going to have a country."

The president has not given much weight to facts about his spending plans since taking office. For instance, in January, he tweeted a claim - without supporting evidence - that the "United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment," adding "we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way ... and without hesitation!"

But one military budget expert, Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies called that contention "not correct." Mr Harrison calculates that of the $2 trillion Mr Trump's administration spent on the military since 2017, "the part of the budget spent on procurement of equipment was $0.42 trillion over that time. If you include [research and development], it comes to $0.68 trillion."

But what Mr Trump cares about very much is his political base.

To that end, a 5 per cent proposed cut to discretionary spending programmes included in the proposal will undoubtedly be met with applause from conservatives who oppose the kinds of safety social net and foreign aid programmes he wants to cut.

Also of interest for his base - and House Democrats - will be a $2bn request for Mr Trump's proposed border wall program. White House officials acknowledge Democrats likely will again block those monies, but are planning to again transfer billions from Pentagon accounts for work on border barrier along the US-Mexico border.

That barrier is widely popular with Mr Trump's political base, and the transfer plan will allow him to case Democrats as in favour of "open borders," forcing him to take money from the military to build the structure.

"See, I say Democrats are lousy politicians because they have lousy policy. Open borders, sanctuary cities," Mr Trump said last week during a raucous "celebration" event at the White House the day after the Senate acquitted him on two articles of impeachment. "They have horrible policy. Who the hell can win?"

But top Democrats on Monday did not wait for the official release of the spending plan to signal much of its contents are dead on arrival.

"The budget is a statement of values and once again the president is showing just how little he values the good health, financial security and well-being of hard-working American families," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

"Year after year, President Trump's budgets have sought to inflict devastating cuts to critical lifelines that millions of Americans rely on," the California Democrat said in a statement. "Less than a week after promising to protect families' health care in his State of the Union address, the president is now brazenly inflicting savage multi-billion-dollar cuts to Medicare and Medicaid - at the same time that he is fighting in federal court to destroy protections for people with pre-existing conditions and dismantle every other protection and benefit of the Affordable Care Act."

As a candidate, Mr Trump promised to wipe out the national deficit by the time he leaves office. But a senior administration official on Monday described the 2021 proposal as a "budget that balances in 15 years."

The senior administration official also said the proposal calls for "$4.6 trillion in deficit reduction" and "$4.4 trillion in spending reductions."

Among the latter is a proposal to slash foreign aid by 21 per cent. Slashing funding to assist other countries with programmes Washington traditionally has viewed in its own interests almost inevitably will be blocked by lawmakers in both parties.

Even Trump allies, like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have opposed and reversed such proposals included in Mr Trump's previous spending plans.

Budget experts see bits and pieces of Mr Trump's plan, such as a section defining federal waste and pitching changes to eliminate it, could gain traction on Capitol Hill among members of both parties. But, for the most part, the plan is mostly about his re-election bid than seeing it actually become the law of the land.

"Trump wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid in order to fund an even larger defence budget," former Clinton-era Labour Secretary Robert Reich tweeted Monday. "His budget won't become law because Dems control the House."