The wall may be the only thing staying consistent across President Trump's annual budget proposals.
Trump unveiled his 2020 budget plan Monday, which unsurprisingly included $8.6 billion in border wall funding despite his failure to get a quarter of that in 2019. More surprising is how much Trump sees the national debt growing through the next decade — and just how much America will have to fork over to pay it off.
In his 2018 budget proposal, Trump estimated America's national debt would expand from about $14.2 trillion in 2016 to $18.6 trillion in 2027. But now, his projections say America's debt will grow by more than $8 trillion to $24 trillion by 2027. That's nearly twice the debt growth Trump forecasted two years ago. This budget also erases the future surplus Trump once predicted.
This debt projection comes despite Trump's call to cut $845 billion from Medicare in 2020; it was all but counteracted by his call for a $750 billion defense budget increase. That all means, as The Washington Post notes, that the government's $482 billion debt interest payment will cost more than Medicaid next year.
As is obvious from this year's budget fiasco turned longest government shutdown ever, the president's spending plan doesn't usually come to fruition. But even though we're months from negotiations, Trump's proposal doesn't look too promising.