Trump’s budget is a wily political move

The US president gears up for negotiations with budgets that have no hope of passing. Emily Hohler reports.

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Trump: not afraid of red ink
(Image credit: 2019 Getty Images)

Donald Trump's latest budget proposal, which demands billions for a border wall at the expense of social safety nets and environmental protections, was dismissed on Monday as "dead on arrival", says David Smith in The Guardian. His $4.7trn budget for the 2020 fiscal year, which starts in October, includes cuts to domestic programmes of 5% or $2.7trn over ten years in order supposedly to curb America's national debt, which stands at a record $22trn. But budgets released by the White House have "little chance of passing". They are more "starting points for negotiation with Congress".

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.