Trump’s Defense Increase ‘Historic’?
President Donald Trump told the nation’s governors that his first budget would include “a historic increase in defense spending.” But defense experts say that’s not the case.
For fiscal year 2018, Trump has proposed a 9.4 percent increase in the base defense budget, which does not including war funding. But Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan enacted double-digit increases in base defense spending in five years in the 1980s — including a whopping 25 percent increase in fiscal 1981.
On Feb. 27, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney Trump’s first proposed budget would contain.)
