A Congressional Research Service report says President Donald Trump’s proposal to increase defense spending by $54 billion for fiscal 2018 would exceed the $549 billion spending cap under the Budget Control Act, GovExec reported Tuesday.
Charles Clark writes that Trump has proposed cuts to domestic programs to offset 60 percent of the defense funding boost.
The CRS report, obtained by the the Federation of American Scientists, also shows that Trump’s request for supplemental defense funds would top fiscal 2017 BCA spending limits by approximately $25 billion.
“Defense appropriations at those levels for either year would trigger sequestration, in the absence of the appropriate statutory changes to BCA,” CRS analysts Lynn Williams and Pat Towell said in their joint report.