Biden seeks huge funding increases for education, health care, environmental protection in first budget request

WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden on Friday asked Congress to authorize a massive $1.5 trillion federal spending plan later this year, seeking to invest heavily in a number of government agencies to boost education, expand affordable housing, bolster public health and confront climate change.

The request marks Biden’s first discretionary spending proposal, a precursor to the full annual budget he aims to release later in the spring that will address programs including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The president’s early blueprint calls for a nearly 16% increase in funding across nondefense domestic agencies, reflecting the White House’s guiding belief that a bigger, better resourced government in Washington can help address the country’s most pressing political and economic challenges.

Many of the programs Biden seeks to fund at higher levels starting in October are initiatives that President Donald Trump had unsuccessfully tried to slash while in the White House. In a further break with Trump, who labored to spend sizable sums on defense during his term, Biden’s new plan calls for a less than 2% increase for the military in the upcoming fiscal year.

But the administration’s approach quickly divided lawmakers from both parties. Senior Senate Republicans accused the president of trying to shortchange the Pentagon, which they alleged would put the country at a disadvantage against China. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and other progressives demanded deep cuts to the military’s budget, though they endorsed the domestic investments that Biden put forward in his plan.

The mixed reception illustrates the balancing act Biden faces as he tries to navigate a Washington budget process that remains unsettled in the aftermath of the Trump administration. Democrats notched numerous spending victories during the Trump administration because Republicans kept capitulating on demands for spending controls. Biden, Republicans, and congressional liberals are all expected to test one another again in the coming months as they debate a budget plan ahead of October.

Under Biden’s new proposal, the Education Department would see a roughly 41% increase over its current allocation, reaching $102 billion next fiscal year, with most of the new funds targeted for the Title I program, which funds high-poverty schools. The proposal would double federal spending on the Title I program and represent the largest increase since it was created more than 55 years ago.

The plan also proposes a roughly 23% boost to the Department of Health and Human Services, including more than $8.7 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which the administration says is the highest funding level for the public health agency in two decades. It would create a new federal agency under the National Institutes of Health, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, focused initially on innovative research on cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.

The budget envisions nearly $69 billion in federal money toward addressing public housing, a 15% increase from the amounts enacted in 2021, to help low-income families obtain access to affordable living accommodations. And the Biden administration hopes to set aside a total of $14 billion in new sums across government to protect the environment, including efforts to reduce carbon emissions and research clean-energy technology.

“Together, America has a chance not simply to go back to the way things were before the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn struck, but to begin building a better, stronger, more secure, more inclusive America,” the White House’s acting budget chief, Shalanda Young, said in a letter accompanying the blueprint Friday.

In releasing the spending document, the White House set off what is an annual, often bitterly partisan fight in Washington, as lawmakers race to fund the government before the current spending agreement expires at the end of September. The vast increases Biden seeks come in addition to the $1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package that he signed into law last month and the roughly $2 trillion plan to upgrade the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure that the White House asked Congress to adopt last week. In total, the budget would increase all federal discretionary spending by roughly 8% in 2022.

But setting federal spending at such high levels may prove difficult for Democrats, who maintain only narrow majorities in the House and Senate. They will probably have to rely on Republicans, who maintain filibuster power in the Senate, to fund the government. And some GOP lawmakers already have shown a renewed interest in tightening the federal purse strings - and addressing the budget deficit - after largely ignoring the issue during Trump’s presidency.

On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined a group of chamber Republicans to lay down an apparent, early marker over Biden’s proposal for the U.S. military. The spending request seeks to allot roughly $715 billion in defense spending in the next fiscal year, far less than the 3% to 5% annual increase that some Republicans say is necessary to keep the U.S. military on pace with emerging threats, including China.

“To keep America strong, we must balance domestic and defense spending priorities,” McConnell said in a joint statement with Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who oversee key congressional committees on spending and national security.

“President Biden has said much about reaching across the aisle,” they continued. “Both parties should be able to agree that we must maintain America’s edge over China. We urge President Biden to work with us in a bipartisan manner to ensure that.”

Anticipating the fight ahead, a senior administration official on Friday acknowledged that this is only “the beginning of a long appropriations process” on Capitol Hill. But the aide, who briefed reporters on the budget ahead of its release on the condition of anonymity, said the document for now serves as a “great marker” of the White House’s priorities - and its belief that the country in recent years has underinvested in domestic agencies and programs.

For the past decade, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have been beholden to spending caps as a result of a budget-balancing law Congress adopted in 2011. That has taken its greatest toll on domestic agencies, limiting federal spending across government even as defense funding continued to rise. But those caps expire entering the 2022 fiscal year, allowing Biden broad latitude to seek major increases in areas including education, commerce, energy and health.

“With austerity caps and an era of chronic disinvestment finally behind us, Congress can turn this proposal into a budget that will help generate a stronger, fairer economy, while truly meeting the needs of our communities,” Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said in a statement.

Under Biden’s blueprint, the country would spend $769 billion on nondefense programs. The education dollars include new boosts to Pell Grants, which offer support to low-income college students, though the $400 increase the president has proposed for students each year is smaller than the amount he initially endorsed on the campaign trail. The budget proposal would also expand government-supported child-care programs and add money to hire more counselors and mental health professionals at schools.

Other new funding is slated for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would see a major expansion of voucher programs that might help more than 200,000 families obtain assistance, the administration estimates. And the budget aims to boost climate-change-focused programs, including the Environmental Protection Agency. Aiming to reverse massive cuts at the EPA over the past decade, the Biden administration has requested a roughly 21% increase in its funding, which would support a new, $936 million “environmental justice initiative” that promises to “hold polluters accountable.”

Some of the budget proposals seek to expand initiatives enacted under the $1.9 trillion stimulus, the American Rescue Plan, which Biden signed into law last month. They include new money to help homeless families and veterans, and new federal funding for public health programs targeting racial and ethnic minorities. The budget also proposes roughly $100 million to aid states so they can further improve their unemployment benefits systems in the wake of crushing demand earlier in the pandemic.

Other proposed increases track long-held Democratic policy priorities. There’s more money proposed for police reform and changes to the criminal justice system, for example, and other new investments - totaling $2.1 billion - to try to combat gun violence. And the Biden administration has recommended a significant increase in funding to fight the opioid epidemic, hoping to devote $10.7 billion to the cause next fiscal year.

Republicans sharply blasted the early budget proposal Friday. Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the top GOP lawmaker on the House Budget Committee, criticized the Biden administration for producing what he said amounted to a “back-of-the-envelope booking exercise” weeks late. For its part, the White House faced early obstacles in preparing its spending request because of delays created by the outgoing Trump administration as it sought to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. Adding to the trouble, Biden’s initial pick to lead his top budget office, Neera Tanden, ultimately had to withdraw from consideration amid political blowback to her tweets.

Biden’s budget marks a dramatic reversal in approach compared with Trump, under whom federal spending largely stayed flat until 2020 forced Congress to authorize sweeping new aid to combat the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The gap between government spending and revenue grew to more than $3.1 trillion in 2020 after running above $1 trillion for several years.

To finance these deficits, the Treasury Department issues debt to borrow money. Federal Reserve officials and others encouraged the White House to borrow money last year to help the recovery and because interest rates remained low, but the government must still pay interest on large borrowing levels. Last year, total government debt eclipsed the entire size of the American economy - and over the four years of Trump’s presidency it grew from about $14 trillion to more than $21 trillion.

During his less than three months in office, Biden has not shown any inclination to pivot toward austerity. He has already signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, proposed more than $2 trillion in infrastructure spending and then added new domestic spending as part of his budget plan Friday.

Biden’s new budget plan does not include new ideas for how to change the tax code. Earlier in the week, the Treasury Department unveiled a $2.5 trillion plan to raise corporate taxes as a way to finance infrastructure changes, but Biden has not specified yet whether he will seek further changes to the tax code to offset other areas of new spending.