WASHINGTON — President Trump’s budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year would slash the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent and cut State Department spending by a similar amount in a brash gesture of disdain for big government, according to congressional staff members familiar with the plan.
The budget outline, to be unveiled Thursday, is more of a broad political statement than a detailed plan for spending and taxation. But it represents Trump’s first real effort to translate his broad but vague campaign themes into the black and white of spending priorities.
The president would funnel $54 billion in additional funding into defense programs, beef up immigration enforcement, and significantly reduce the nondefense federal workforce to “dismantle the administrative state,’’ in the words of Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.
Yet for all its headline-grabbing bold strokes, major elements of the plan have already been declared dead on arrival by the Republican leadership in Congress, and much of the fiscal fine print will be filled in by Capitol Hill lawmakers and their aides over the next month.
House appropriations subcommittees began reviewing the plan late Wednesday.
Among the cuts: drastic reductions in the State Department Food for Peace Program, which sends food to poor countries hit by war or natural disasters, and the elimination of the Department of Transportation’s Essential Air Service program, which subsidizes flights to rural airports.
The plan for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 is a “skinny budget,’’ a pared-down first draft of the line-by-line appropriations request submitted by first-term administrations during their first few months.
A broader budget will be released later in the spring that will include Trump’s proposals for taxation as well as the bulk of government spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs.
In addition to the cuts at the EPA and the State Department, Trump’s team is expected to propose a wide array of cuts to public education, and to transportation programs like Amtrak.
Other expected cuts would affect the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including the elimination of the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds popular programs like Meals on Wheels, housing assistance, and other community assistance efforts.
In recent years, far smaller proposed cuts to the popular grant program, which includes flexible funding for a variety of housing and community projects, created a bipartisan uproar that nearly scuttled the entire budget-making process.
The EPA is, arguably, the hardest-hit agency under 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.
That would take the budget down to about $5.7 billion, its lowest level in 40 years, adjusted for inflation. In an initial draft, the White House had proposed cutting about $2 billion from the agency’s budget, taking it down to just over $6 billion, according to an aide familiar with the plan.
Trump’s proposed cuts to the EPA are a magnitude greater even than those envisioned by congressional Republicans, many of whom forcefully oppose the agency’s regulatory agenda.
The proposed State Department cuts, which leaked this month, have already created a backlash among some Capitol Hill Republicans.
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 US Agency for International Development initially proposed by the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget.
