Trump Doesn’t Want a Spending Deal

Jonathan Swan: “Senior administration officials — including acting Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought and fiscally conservative chief Mick Mulvaney — have told Republicans that the president doesn’t want Congress to strike a spending deal in September when current funding runs out. Instead, Team Trump wants a short-term solution to preserve the ability to fight for massive spending cuts in the fifth year of a Trump presidency.”

“The White House thinks the most likely scenario this year is that the president signs a one-year ‘continuing resolution’ (a continuation of 2019 spending levels through 2020), followed by another short-term extension next September to get past the November election.”

“Some senior administration officials envision a newly re-elected Trump liberated to slash spending. They view 2021 as the year to have that fight — the final year in which the president can threaten hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of automatic spending cuts known as the sequester. (These automatic cuts, which attack both defense and domestic spending, expire in 2021.)”