Republicans balk at Obama’s $4 trillion budget
US President Barack Obama will send his final annual budget to Congress as many Republican leaders have branded it dead on arrival.
The Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to pass the $4-trillion budget proposal for the fiscal year 2017, beginning on October 1, but the blueprint will give Obama the chance to outline spending priorities in the final year of his presidency.
"That document ... will be President Obama's final vision of how he lays out the fiscal future for the country," said Joel Friedman, vice president for federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The budget proposal, to be sent to Congress on Tuesday, includes new ideas that the administration has reviewed in recent weeks, including a $1 billion task force to fight cancer, $1.8 billion in emergency funding to combat the Zika virus, and a $10-a-barrel oil tax for infrastructure and clean transportation projects.
While some of these proposals are too much for fiscal conservatives, Congress can advance more agreeable elements of the budget without endorsing the entire package.
The budget blueprint also includes increased funding for military projects such as $7.5 billion to ramp up the fight against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group.
Breaking with a decades-old tradition, the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees announced that they would not even give Obama’s budget director, Shaun Donovan, the usual hearings in their panels.
The snub has angered Democrats. On Monday, 14 Democrats on the House Budget Committee signed a letter denouncing the Republicans' move as “disrespectful to the committee members, the public and the president.”
“I believe that permitting the administration the courtesy of explaining its intent and what it thinks of the policy should have been maintained,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told the New York Times.
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