US President Donald Trump is seeking to boost defence spending by $54bn (\u00a343bn) in his proposed budget plan for 2018, which is about a 9% increase.<\/p>\n
The blueprint also calls for deep cuts elsewhere, including to foreign assistance and environmental budgets.<\/p>\n
But Mr Trump’s plan leaves large welfare programmes such as Social Security and Medicare untouched, despite Republican calls for reform.<\/p>\n
The president is expected to release his final budget proposal in mid-March.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to do more with less and make the government lean and accountable,” Mr Trump said in a meeting with governors at the White House on Monday.<\/p>\n
The president, who vowed to increase military spending and preserve welfare programmes during his campaign, said the budget will focus on “military, safety, economic development”.<\/p>\n
“It will include an historic increase in defence spending to rebuild the depleted military of the United States of America at a time we most need it,” he said.<\/p>\n
The US spends more on defence than any other country at roughly $600bn (\u00a3481bn) annually.<\/p>\n
Mr Trump also said he would discuss his plans for infrastructure spending in a speech to Congress on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to start spending on infrastructure big,” he said.<\/p>\n
The White House sent Mr Trump’s budget blueprint to federal agencies on Monday as it prepares for negotiations with Congress.<\/p>\n
The Republican-controlled Congress must approve any federal spending.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump is seeking to boost defence spending by $54bn (\u00a343bn) in his proposed budget plan for 2018, which is about a 9% increase. The blueprint also calls for deep cuts elsewhere, including to foreign assistance and environmental budgets. But Mr Trump’s plan leaves large welfare programmes such as Social Security and Medicare […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=297676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=297676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=297676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=297676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}