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President Trump's 2021 fiscal year budget proposal has created yet another firestorm of controversy. The proposal calls for a decrease in non-defense discretionary spending of 2 percent annually over the next decade and an increase in defense spending of 1.3 percent per year. This will set off another battle in Congress between Democrats, who support increased non-defense spending, and Republicans, who, generally speaking, want more defense spending. The likely outcome of this battle in Congress will be a so-called "compromise" similar to this year's budget resolution that boosted non-defense and defense spending above what the president proposed. What is unique...

President Donald Trump's proposed fiscal year 2021 budget has been released. Generally, budget documents are more of a statement about priorities and aspirations than of anything else. This proposal is typical: It's full of unrealistic assumptions, as well as "savings" that will never happen. It is, in short, a testament to fiscal irresponsibility. Unfortunately, when you use more realistic assumptions and take politics into consideration, you are left with a lot of spending. What this budget tells us is that this Republican president is a big spender. Under it, the federal government would spend $4.8 trillion in fiscal year 2021....

President Trump is expected to release a $4.8 trillion budget Monday that charts a path for the start of a potential second term, proposing steep cuts to social-safety-net programs and foreign aid and higher outlays for defense and veterans. The plan would increase military spending 0.3%, to $740.5 billion for fiscal year 2021, which begins Oct. 1, according to a senior administration official. The proposal would cut nondefense spending by 5%, to $590 billion, below the level Congress and the president agreed to in a two-year budget deal last summer. A White House budget reflects an administration’s priorities and represents...

There is one interest that almost all elected officials in Washington, D.C., share. It does not matter what state they come from. It does not matter what party they belong to. It does not matter whether they serve in the House, Senate or White House. They want to be reelected. A key tactic they often employ to achieve this shared strategic aim is sometimes celebrated by apologists as "bipartisanship." In practice, bipartisanship less often involves members of both major parties coming together to serve some great national interest and more often involves them coming together to serve their personal political...

The Senate approved a seven-week funding bill on Wednesday, preventing a partial government shutdown that was expected to begin on Saturday. Senators passed the legislation by voice vote, which represented the final item on the Senate's to-do list as they wrap up their work for the year this week It still needs to pass the House, which returned to Washington on Wednesday night, and be signed by President Trump. Republican senators say that while they believe Trump is unhappy with Congress passing a short-term fix, they believe he will sign it because they were able to keep other controversial policy...

GOP senators emerged from the closed-door meeting in visible disbelief that President Trump is refusing to sign a seven-week stopgap measure to fund the government that cleared the chamber by a voice vote less than 24 hours ago. Senate GOP leadership appeared confident on Wednesday that Trump would sign the stopgap, which will fund approximately 25 percent of the government, as long as they kept poison pill policy riders out of it. But Trump, under fire from conservative pundits and lawmakers, reversed course Thursday. “You're ruining my life,” GOP Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) joked to The Hill when told about...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t waste any time Thursday slamming her soon-to-be GOP counterparts in the House of Representatives for their passing a short-term spending bill that includes $5.7 billion that will fund President Donald Trump’s border wall. Ocasio-Cortez, the outspoken New Yorker who will be sworn-in to office next month, said border wall money could better be used for teacher pay, infrastructure and left-leaning distribution ideas like tuition, green jobs and prescription refills.

Can the government spend money that has not been specifically authorized by Congress? In theory – no. In practice? Absolutely. Each year the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on things that are not specifically authorized by Congress. Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit in this practice. President Donald Trump, to his credit, has worked hard to get his wall funding properly authorized. But he may ultimately do exactly what presidents before him have done: take advantage of the broken Congressional process.

The Democrats aren’t going to get away with holding the federal government hostage to their radical open-borders agenda. Not again.The Democrats know that they got the Republicans to cave during the previous budget impasse, which produced a bloated $1.3 trillion Omnibus spending bill that didn’t fund construction of the border wall. President Trump reluctantly signed that bill, but he did so with a vow that he would never again put his signature on such a bad piece of legislation.“As a matter of National Security I've signed the Omnibus Spending Bill. I say to Congress: I will NEVER sign another...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s demand for border wall funds hurled the federal government closer to a shutdown as the Republican-led House approved a package Thursday with his $5.7 billion request that is almost certain to be rejected by the Senate. The White House said Trump will not travel to Florida on Friday for the Christmas holiday if the government is shutting down. More than 800,000 federal workers will be facing furloughs or forced to work without pay if a resolution is not reached before funding expires at midnight Friday.

President Donald Trump will not sign a Senate-passed spending bill, increasing the chances of a partial government shutdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday after meeting with the president. The Senate unanimously approved the legislation Wednesday night to keep the government funded through Feb. 8. With Trump's support, it appeared set to breeze through the House before the midnight Friday deadline to fund seven agencies that make up about a quarter of the government. But Trump, who seeks $5 billion to build his proposed border wall, will refuse to sign the measure without his desired border security measures, Ryan said....

I don't get Twitter, but those are the exact trump words according to Wmal I will not sign any of their legislation unless it has PERFECT border security. Shutdown here we come! Wall, here we come!

“They don’t even tell you – what does that mean, ‘the government shut down’? First of all, that phrase is a lie; the government doesn’t shut down. You’ll be long dead – your children and your grandchildren too – before this government shuts down, unless it shuts down from a financial and economic collapse. But, legally? No. “‘Seventy-five percent of the government[’s] already been funded’ – are you aware of this? – as they point out at CNSNews.com. “He signed a minibus appropriations bill – the president did – ‘that funded the Department of Energy; Military Construction [and] Veterans Affairs;...

The White House wants to avoid a partial government shutdown and has found other ways to get the border wall President Trump is demanding, spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Tuesday. Sanders’ comments come four days before large portions of the federal government will begin shutting down unless Congress and Trump act first. Trump has been demanding $5 billion from Congress for his border wall, which Democrats refuse to give. But Sanders told Fox News Channel: “We have other ways that we can get to that $5 billion.” “At the end of the day we don’t want to shut down the government,...

No wall funding

McConnell also has told Senate colleagues he is not interested in shutting down government agencies, and told reporters recently that a shutdown would not be "a great way to end what in my view has been the most successful Congress, right of center, in decades.”

President Trump is dismissing the importance of paying down the national debt, saying he won’t be in office to take blame for the nation's fiscal crisis when it becomes even more unsustainable, according to a report Wednesday. The national debt sits at $21 trillion and counting. As a candidate, when the national debt was $19 trillion, Trump promised to erase the entire debt “over a period of eight years.” Senior administration officials showed Trump charts and graphics in early 2017 that illustrated a “hockey stick” spike in the debt in the coming years. Trump said the data showed the national...

Congress secretly boosted U.S. spy agency funding last year, pushing intelligence budgets to their highest publicly known level and raising questions about the reason for the surge. Non-military spy agency budgets soared nearly 9 percent to $59.4 billion in fiscal 2018, and military intelligence funding grew more than 20 percent to $22.1 billion. Overall intelligence spending increased more than 10 percent to $81.5 billion, according to the figures released Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department, a month after the fiscal year ended.

"We're going to be asking for a 5 percent cut from every secretary today," Trump told reporters at the White House in advance of a meeting with those secretaries. The proposal comes days after the Trump administration announced a $779 billion budget deficit for fiscal year 2018 — a six-year high and a 17 percent jump from the prior period. "He's asking them to cut the fraud, the waste, the abuse," White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway said on Fox Business News. "Cut the fat, not the essentials." Trump had said in an earlier interview on the network that "We're...

President Trump could decide to veto a spending bill and allow parts of the government to shut down. -- President Donald Trump could decide to shut down parts of the government in the coming days as he pushes for money to build his proposed border wall. (please see link for full article)