Proposal released on heels of two-year budget deal signed into law by president on Friday; unlikely to have much impact
President Trump today released his budget proposal for FY 2019, the opening shot in the annual federal budget process.
The $4.4 trillion plan, which includes his long-awaited infrastructure
plan and funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, cuts
entitlement programs by $1.7 trillion, including federal student aid
programs and research funding.
Among other proposals,
the budget would eliminate the Supplemental Educational Opportunity
Grant program, cut Federal Work-Study nearly in half, consolidate TRIO
and GEAR UP and significantly cut their overall funding. In addition, it
proposes to cut nearly $203 billion from student loan programs.
However, the budget would expand Pell Grant eligibility to short-term
workforce programs, a request that also was included in the House GOP’s
Higher Education Act reauthorization bill, the PROSPER Act.
Similar to the president’s FY 2018 budget
request, the FY 2019 request also includes cuts to science and research
agencies. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be funded at $33
billion, a decrease of $1 billion below FY 2017. The budget request
does not include any changes or caps on indirect costs, which had been
proposed in the FY 2018 budget request. However, it would cap the amount
of salaries (to 90 percent) and compensation allowed under NIH grants.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) would be level funded at $7.47
billion.
The budget would eliminate the National
Endowment for Humanities, an elimination that the president first
proposed in his FY 2018 budget request but was rejected by Senate
appropriators.
Immigration is a steady theme throughout the
proposed budget: The president is requesting $18 billion for his border
wall and $200 billion for the infrastructure proposal unveiled alongside
the budget. The proposal also includes $782 million to hire 2,750 new
border and immigration officers, and $2.7 billion to detain people in
the country illegally. These provisions likely will be key in the
ongoing legislative battle over the Obama-era Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy and Dreamers, which the Senate started
working on today.
Budget director Mick Mulvaney said Sunday
that the request “assumes there will be agreement on how to handle the
legal status of young undocumented immigrants covered under the Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals program,” Politico reported last night.
Congress Passes Two-Year Budget Deal That Will Supersede Trump Request
The president’s budget is unlikely to gain
any traction on Capitol Hill, this year even more than usual. And
Congress passed its own spending bill on Friday that includes a two-year budget, which makes the president’s proposal largely a non-starter. President Trump signed that measure later that day.
The two-year deal circumvents the strict
budget caps imposed under a 2011 budget deal and adds $57 billion in new
spending to non-defense accounts through FY 2019. The actual amounts to
be spent on individual programs and agencies—like Pell Grants, NIH, and
NSF—have not yet been determined, but the measure makes it clear that
spending will increase for NIH and federal student financial aid.
The measure also includes a one-year
extension of the above-the-line deduction for qualified tuition and
related expenses (tuition deduction) retroactive for 2017, which had
expired in 2016. The tuition deduction helps reduce the cost of college
by allowing students or their parents to deduct up to $4,000 in eligible
higher education expenses from their taxable income. It is particularly
important to graduate students, who are ineligible for the American
Opportunity Tax Credit.