President Donald Trump will submit his annual budget to Congress Monday for fiscal year 2020, which requests $8.6 billion in border wall funding and cuts domestic spending, officials familiar with the plans tell The Daily Caller.
The two pillars of Trump’s budget requests represent the administration’s priorities going into the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s $8.6 billion request would provide funding for approximately 344 additional miles of border wall, assuming a generally accepted figure of a required $25 million-per-mile.
People work on the U.S./ Mexican border wall on February 12, 2019, in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
A Daily Caller analysis previously found that Trump has secured funding for approximately 422 miles of the requested 722 miles between his national emergency declaration, executive actions, and congressionally appropriated funding. (RELATED: Trump Will Sign Border Bill, Declare National Emergency)
An administration official stressed to The Caller that this figure constitutes of either 18-foot bollard wall fencing or 32-foot levee wall fencing, which is the barrier that Trump has emphasized as necessary.
The budget request aligns with a signature Trump campaign slogan “Finish The Wall,” which was emblazoned high and wide in a recent campaign rally at the border in El Paso, Texas. The president’s budget also pays homage to long-held conservative desires to cut federal government spending, proposing an approximately 5-percent cut on non-defense spending.
The border division between Mexico and the U.S. in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on January 26, 2017. (HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
The administration will simultaneously seek a large increase in military spending in a maneuver designed to force Democrats to accept spending cuts and not increase current caps.
A senior administration official previously explained to the Caller that one strategy behind the spending caps fight is to decouple it from raising the debt ceiling. Congress is quickly approaching the deadline for raising the debt limit, increasing the risk that the United States could default on its record-high $22 trillion national debt.