Trump administration

The White House budget proposal would cut SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as food stamps, by $193 billion over 10 years. Right now a family of six gets about $900 a month in food aid. Under Trump’s proposal, that would be the cap, even for households with more people. Many families that receive […]

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin faced his second day of grilling on Capitol Hill today, this time appearing before the Senate Finance Committee to discuss his boss’s proposed budget for next year. Baked into that budget is the assumption that the U.S. economy will start growing at 3 percent or higher by the year 2021, which […]

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney were on Capitol Hill this week sounding the alarm on the debt ceiling. That’s the limit on how much debt the government can rack up. Mnuchin and Mulvaney said Congress might have to lift or suspend the debt limit sooner than planned. […]

President Trump has arrived in Brussels on the latest leg of his first official foreign trip since his election. Apart from meeting European leaders, he will visit NATO’s shiny new headquarters in the Belgian capital. This could be a tricky visit. During the election campaign, Trump was not overly complimentary about the alliance. Click the […]

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was on the Hill today defending the president’s 2018 budget request before a House appropriations subcommittee. The White House has proposed cutting or shrinking more than 30 federal education programs, shaving more than 13 percent off the overall budget. That’s the biggest proposed cut to the department’s discretionary funding since the […]

The Trump administration’s budget proposal is coming under fire from economists and tax experts who say it uses some math that just doesn’t add up. In short, there’s a roving $2 trillion in it that nobody can really explain. Click the audio player above to hear the full story.

The Trump administration in its budget proposes to sell off half of the country’s strategic reserve of crude oil. The idea is that putting more than 300 million barrels of energy onto the market could raise more than $16 billion over the course of a decade. Proponents note that the oil market is more open, […]

The federal budget released today is pretty much a fantasy document that will be dead on arrival when it gets to Congress, economists say. But even scaled back, proposed budget cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and other programs for the poor are likely to tear a hole in the safety net the likes of which […]