A summary of the budget posted online notes that the cuts will be achieved by “reducing or eliminating woke, weaponised and wasteful programmes, and by returning local responsibilities to their respective governments”.<\/p>\n
US President Donald Trump has long signalled a desire to increase the defence budget and boost domestic defence manufacturing.<\/p>\n
At a private event at the White House earlier this week – which was caught on camera – Trump said that military spending should be a national priority going forward. <\/p>\n
“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things, they can do it on a state basis,” the president said, adding that the focus should be on “military protection”. <\/p>\n
Non-defence spending in the proposed budget has fallen by 10%, or about $73bn.<\/p>\n
Trump’s proposed budget would mark a 42% increase over the previous fiscal year, totalling $445bn. <\/p>\n
Of the total, approximately $1.1tn would be in discretionary spending for the Pentagon, the highest on record. <\/p>\n
Another $350bn – specifically for the industrial defence base – would come from a process known as budget reconciliation, a procedural shortcut that lets some legislation pass the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes. <\/p>\n
The budget also requests pay rises for troops and $65.8 billion in shipbuilding funding, including for what Trump has referred to as a “Golden Fleet” of next-generation vessels. <\/p>\n
These include the heavily-armed Trump-class battleships unveiled in December.<\/p>\n
Trump said at a news conference announcing the battleship that the construction of the first of the vessels, the USS Defiant, would begin soon, with the first ships operational in two-and-a-half years. <\/p>\n
Administration officials have repeatedly warned that the US currently lags behind China in both shipbuilding capacity and total output.<\/p>\n