WASHINGTON--President Donald Trump's first budget outline, calling for a security-heavy realignment of federal spending, drew resistance on Thursday from his fellow Republicans in the U.S. Congress as many balked at proposed deep cuts to diplomatic and foreign aid programmes.
Conservatives have plenty to like in the White House plan, with its 10 percent increase in military spending next year and beefed-up funding to help deport more illegal immigrants and build a wall on the border with Mexico. It also takes steps to downsize government, a central goal of conservatives.
But the gaze into Trump's priorities for the next four years proved too savage for many Republicans' taste, foreshadowing an intense battle between Congress and the White House over spending in coming months. Although Republicans control both the Senate and House of Representatives, Congress holds the federal purse strings and seldom approves presidents' budget plans.
The administration asked Congress for a 28 percent, or $10.9 billion, cut in State Department funding and other international programmes to help pay for a 10 percent, $54 billion hike in military spending next year.
"These increases in defense come at the expense of national security," said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has not hesitated to take on Trump. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who like Graham ran unsuccessfully for president in 2016, leveled similar sentiments, as did some prominent Republicans in the House of Representatives.
House Speaker Paul Ryan sidestepped reporters' questions about whether he supported State Department cuts, saying the White House blueprint was just the start of the budget process. The budget also drew criticism internationally. The French ambassador to the United Nations, Francois Delattre, warned that cutting funding of global programmes could fuel instability.
The White House shrugged off concerns about the impact, saying Trump was making good on election promises. "The president said, specifically, hundreds of times - you covered him - 'I'm going to spend less money on people overseas and more money on people back home' and that's exactly what we're doing with this budget," Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters.
Democrats, whose votes would be needed later this year to sign off on the spending bills that implement any budget blueprint given the slim Republican hold on the Senate, attacked the proposed reductions to the Environmental Protection Agency and programmes that benefit the poor. The White House proposal would inflict a 31 percent, or $2.6 billion, cut on the EPA.
Some veteran Republicans, including Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a White House budget chief during the administration of President George W. Bush, vowed to preserve the EPA's Great Lakes restoration programme that Trump wants to eliminate.
Moderate Republicans expressed unease with potential cuts to popular domestic programmes. Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, attacked plans to cut or eliminate programmes that help the poor pay heating bills, provide aid for localities to deal with wastewater and subsidize air travel in rural areas like her home state of Alaska.
"We need to remember that these programmes are not the primary drivers of our debt," Murkowski said. In fact, those "discretionary" programmes that must be renewed annually by Congress, account for about $1.2 trillion out of a $3.9 trillion federal budget.
The biggest portion of the budget - about $2.4 trillion - is for "mandatory entitlement" programmes that provide Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare and Medicaid healthcare for the elderly, poor and disabled. Conservatives have been clamoring for years for reforms to those programmes to save money. Trump vowed, however, to protect them as he campaigned for president last year.
