You can't judge a budget proposal just by the spending amount for one year. Trump's FY 2019 budget actually contains a lot of long-term cuts and budget reforms that will greatly help to get our fiscal house in order. It also contains sweeping governmental structural reforms that will cut federal bureaucracy and eliminate a great deal of waste. You have to read the whole proposal to see the depth and breadth of the proposed changes. Here's a very brief summary:
And:
This volume describes major savings and reform proposals included in the 2019 President’s Budget. It includes both discretionary and mandatory savings proposals that work to bring Federal spending under control, and reduce deficits by $3.6 trillion over the budget window. These proposals encompass an aggressive set of actions to redefine the proper role of the Federal Government and curtail those programs that fail to efficiently and effectively deliver promised outcomes to the American people. In total, this volume highlights 2019 proposed savings of $48.4 billion in discretionary programs, including $25.8 billion in program eliminations and $22.6 billion in reductions. The volume also describes the major mandatory savings proposals summarized in Table S-6 of the Budget volume. Many of the eliminations and reductions in this volume reflect a continuation of policies proposed in the 2018 President’s Budget that have not yet been enacted by the Congress. New savings and reforms proposals focus on the Administration’s efforts to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in Federal programs. Notable new proposals would strengthen the ability for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to detect and prevent fraud, protecting beneficiaries from harm and improving payment accuracy and reporting; where other proposals reflect the Administration’s efforts to shift critical resources to the most pressing and highest-priority areas, such as national defense and homeland security. The Administration will continue to build on these proposals in order to implement the President’s charge to reform the Federal Government and reduce the Federal civilian workforce. The savings and reform proposals included in this volume continue, and expand on, the Administration’s efforts to create an efficient, effective and accountable Government. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/msar-fy2019.pdf)
And:
The higher discretionary caps reached in the cap deal provide an opportunity to eliminate longstanding budget gimmicks and to bring more Federal spending under these caps. Notably, the discretionary spending caps are circumvented annually by the Congress through the use of changes in mandatory programs, or CHIMPs, that generate no net outlay savings, but are used to offset real increases in discretionary spending. While there are programmatic reasons for some CHIMPs, most of them are accounting gimmicks- they push the availability of funding from one year to the next, or rescind money from a program that no one actually expected would be spent. As part of this addendum, the Administration proposes to use $17. 7 billion within the new NDD spending caps to eliminate the use of CHIMPs from appropriations bills, except for a handful of small CHIMPs that are not gimmicks. The Administration also recommends changing budget scoring rules to eliminate the use of CHIMPs as a scoring gimmick. This elimination of CHIMPs includes a series of reforms to the Crime Victims Fund- by far the largest CHIMP- that would cap receipts going into the fund and provide more certainty on how the funds are used going forward. In addition, the Administration's addendum would complete the effort begun in the FY 2018 President's Budget to phase out OCO funding at the Department of State (State) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). State and USAID were first appropriated OCO funding in FY 2012 to support temporary and extraordinary needs related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since that time, State's OCO funding has been greatly expanded to fund enduring, anticipated costs that properly belong in State's base budget.
This addendum also proposes to move mandatory funding for the Department of Health and Human Services- including $5.8 billion in base funding and $5 billion requested for opioids in the FY 2019 Budget- to the NDD caps. The activities supported with these mandatory funds are used for similar or identical purposes as other discretionary funding. Moving this funding to the NDD caps would allow the Congress and the Administration to determine the appropriate amount of funding each year, and weigh funding for these programs against other competing priorities within the NDD caps. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Addendum-to-the-FY-2019-Budget.pdf)
This addendum also proposes to move mandatory funding for the Department of Health and Human Services- including $5.8 billion in base funding and $5 billion requested for opioids in the FY 2019 Budget- to the NDD caps. The activities supported with these mandatory funds are used for similar or identical purposes as other discretionary funding. Moving this funding to the NDD caps would allow the Congress and the Administration to determine the appropriate amount of funding each year, and weigh funding for these programs against other competing priorities within the NDD caps. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Addendum-to-the-FY-2019-Budget.pdf)
