President Donald Trump cited spiraling public debt figures but gave himself some cover as he prepares to submit his first budget to Congress, saying he’s only been in office a month.
‘We’re going to take this budget, which is in all fairness I’ve only been here for four weeks, so I can’t take too much of the blame for what’s happened but it is absolutely out of control,” Trump said as he met with his budget team Wednesday.
‘Unfortunately, the budget that we’re inheriting essentially inherit something a mess,’ Trump said as he allowed reporters to get pictures while he met with his budget team.
‘The finances of our country are a mess, but we’re going to clean them up,’ he vowed. ‘Things that we’ve been doing, including negotiating deals that have already been negotiated, so you call it renegotiating on airplanes and lots of other things, military items,’ he said.
He said the nation ‘will end up getting many more planes free or we’ll save a lot of money but we’ve already saved a lot – billions and billions of dollars we’ve saved.’
Trump hasn’t been as shy about taking credit for good things, such as job gains and a booming stock market.
‘The stock market has hit record numbers, as you know,’ Trump said at press conference last week. ‘And there has been a tremendous surge of optimism in the business world. Plants and factories are already starting to move back into the United States, and big league—Ford, General Motors, so many of them,’ he said.
Trump in mid-March will unveil his first government budget, a keystone statement of his priorities for the coming years, the White House said Wednesday.
‘We won’t let your money be wasted anymore,’ he said.
The nearly four trillion dollar annual federal budget is a declaration of intent that puts the president’s policy goals down in black and white.
It also separates affordable campaign promises from the fanciful and is the final arbitrator after turf wars between departments and powerful interest groups.
“We’ll have something in mid-March,” said White House spokesman Sean Spicer.
Trump huddled with budget advisors early Wednesday to rake through the proposals.
At the meeting Trump repeated his campaign rhetoric about cutting waste and renegotiating federal contracts.
“The finances of this country are a mess but we’re going to clean that up,” he said.
US president after US president has made similar promises on coming to office, before delving into a text that runs in the thousands of pages and tossing the plan into the thicket of Congress.
Trump has oodles of campaign promises to pay for, but faces a national debt set to hit $20 trillion on his watch and a deficit at 3.1 percent of GDP and rising.
Trump’s promises — from building a wall on the Mexican border to deporting undocumented immigrants — carry an estimated price tag of $5.3 trillion, according to the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
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