The submission will set off months of debate in Congress. Democrats have already voiced strong opposition to the plan, and even Republicans are wary of the political dangers in Trump's draconian cuts.

He suggests the budget's $191 billion cut to food assistance and $40 billion cut to public service loan forgiveness over the next decade are necessary sacrifices, but fails to mention that Trump's budget includes a $5.5 trillion tax cut that will mainly benefit the wealthy.

What effect would Trump's budget have on Medicaid? I'm aware of the criticisms and would simply come back and say there's other places where we were probably overly conservative in our accounting.

Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and National Economic Council director in the previous two Democratic administrations, wrote in the Washington Post that this represents "the most egregious accounting error in a presidential budget in the almost 40 years I have been tracking them".

Mulvaney defended the budget and the more-than-rosy assumptions that he made to get the budget to balance in a decade. For those of you who aren't familiar with that, the tax gap is the amount of money that we should collect in taxes every single year, but don't - for 2016 that number is $486bn. The more states spend on the program, the more the federal government reimburses them. States that voted for Clinton would collectively face a drop of 4.8 percent, while those that backed Trump would see assistance cut by 1.2 percent. "It's not fair to the people that have been paying in for years", Trump said at a leadership summit in New Hampshire.

At the same time, the blueprint boosts spending for the military by tens of billions and calls for $1.6 billion for a border wall with Mexico that Trump repeatedly promised voters the US neighbor would finance.

Trump's budget was unveiled while he was out of the U.S.

Cavs remain humble with chance to closeout Celtics in Game 5
That puts him just one behind Bill Russell , whose Celtics teams played in eight consecutive finals from 1959-1966. He's averaging 9.5 points and 3.8 rebounds through four games.

But the effort has stalled as the White House grapples with the political fallout from allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.

"We finally have a president who's willing to actually even balance the budget", said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. These cuts are largely concentrated in the area of non-defense general government - everything from labor to commerce to agriculture to environment to public lands and foreign service - and would reduce the role of the federal government nearly to a pre-World War II level.

Presidents' budgets are suggestions, road maps, grand ideas.

That's what the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy said Tuesday, in a first-day analysis of Trump's 2017-18 budget. "This budget is not going to go anywhere".

Democrats also took aim at proposed cuts to social programs. Yet America's poorest and most vulnerable people should be the last group called upon to sacrifice for the sake of deficit reduction, not the first - and certainly not the only.

Discussing a spending plan that has been critiqued on both sides of the aisle, Smucker used his time to ask the director about the current trajectory of the federal budget deficit, whether economic growth will fuel opportunities for businesses and what President Trump's budget does to address the opioid epidemic. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue were also testifying.