“To Boost Military Budget, Trump Targets Popular Programs at Home” [New York Times]

The New York Times reports, “Trump has eyed a series of potentially unpopular and divisive domestic spending cuts for the next fiscal year, in a move that may test the political appetite and financial health of a cost-weary American public.” Last week, Trump was caught on camera saying the government could NOT pay for health care because “we’re fighting wars.”

The proposed budget steals taxpayer dollars for the biggest year-to-year increase in defense spending since World War II. To pay for the war, Trump is demanding Congressional Republicans eliminate LIHEAP, slash WIC, crush Medicaid, gut affordable housing, and decimate USDA’s Rural Business Service. At the same time, Trump’s ‘America Last’ budget would explode the deficit.

Read more from the New York Times here.

New York Times: To Boost Military Budget, Trump Targets Popular Programs at Home
By Tony Romm and Annie Karni | April 7, 2026

• Mr. Trump has eyed a series of potentially unpopular and divisive domestic spending cuts for the next fiscal year, in a move that may test the political appetite and financial health of a cost-weary American public. Even as voters grow frustrated with the economy — and seem eager to exact their vengeance at the ballot box — the president has proposed to scale back some of the very federal programs that are meant to ease families’ toughest financial burdens.
• By the president’s own reasoning, the U.S. government cannot afford the expense. At a private lunch last week, Mr. Trump insisted that Washington needed to prioritize “military protection” above all else, especially with the United States still at war with Iran. Otherwise, he said in a since-deleted video, the country could not continue to shoulder the financial burden of services including “day care,” Medicare and Medicaid.
• In an interview, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called Mr. Trump’s latest budget “an extraordinary admission of Republican policy cruelty that they’ve been inflicting on the American people in real time since the very beginning of his presidency.”
• Mr. Jeffries said he was “extremely optimistic” that Democrats would win back control of the House in November by a large margin, partly because of Mr. Trump’s actions. He added, “Republicans don’t give a damn about making life more affordable for the American people.”
• Democrats vigorously objected to the president’s military request, and many took quick issue with the way he sought to offset it, arguing that Mr. Trump had essentially asked the public to front the cost for a war that it did not want. Mr. Jeffries, for one, described the approach as an open acknowledgment that the “Republican Party is all about warfare, not health care.”
• Mr. Trump proposed to slash more than $15 billion at the Department of Health and Human Services, once again targeting federally funded medical research, though the cuts he sought were less stark than those proposed one year ago. The White House also called for revoking about $15 billion in money meant to combat climate change, reprising its desire to eliminate funds that improve clean energy and clamp down on harmful emissions.