Trump Officials Unveil Budget Cuts to Aid for Health, Housing and Research

The Trump administration on Friday unveiled fuller details of its proposal to slash about $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year, offering a more intricate glimpse into the vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs that would be hit by the deepest cuts.

The many spending reductions throughout the roughly 1,220-page document and agency blueprints underscored President Trump’s desire to foster a vast transformation in Washington. His budget seeks to reduce the size of government and its reach into Americans lives, including services to the poor.

The new proposal reaffirmed the president’s recommendation to set federal spending levels at their lowest in modern history, as the White House first sketched out in its initial submission to Congress transmitted in early May. But it offered new details about the ways in which Mr. Trump hoped to achieve the savings, and the many functions of government that could be affected as a result.

The White House budget is not a matter of law. Ultimately, it is up to Congress to determine the budget, and in recent years it has routinely discarded many of the president’s proposals. Lawmakers are only starting to embark on the annual process, with government funding set to expire at the end of September.

The updated budget reiterated the president’s pursuit of deep reductions for nearly every major federal agency, reserving its steepest cuts for foreign aid, medical research, tax enforcement and a slew of anti-poverty programs, including rental assistance. The White House restated its plan to seek a $33 billion cut at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, and another $33 billion reduction at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Targeting the Education Department, the president again put forward a roughly $12 billion cut, seeking to eliminate dozens of programs while unveiling new changes to Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college.

The maximum award would be capped at $5,710 for the 2026-7 award year, a decrease of more than $1,600. A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget attributed the cap to a pre-existing shortfall in the program. So while it did not propose to cut spending on Pell grants, the Trump administration also opted against providing new money to sustain the student aid at its existing level.

Mr. Trump also targeted the nutritional program for women, infants and children, which helped about 6.7 million poorer recipients last year afford food. His budget proposed to roll back a policy that had increased the benefits low-income families receive for fruits and vegetables under the program.

Georgia Machell, the president of the National WIC Association, which represents providers, estimated in a statement Friday that the move would result in breastfeeding mothers seeing those monthly benefits drop to $13 from $54, while for young children, the monthly allowance would be reduced to $10 from $27.

The Office of Management and Budget maintained that the top-line funding level for the program had not changed and that it would still serve eligible participants.

And as part of a reorientation that slashed federal health spending, the president proposed chopping funding at the National Cancer Institute by more than $2.7 billion, nearly a 40 percent decrease, drawing a sharp rebuke from cancer research supporters late Friday.

“For the past 50 years, every significant medical breakthrough, especially in the treatment of cancer, has been linked to sustained federal investment in research” by the institute, the American Cancer Society Action Network said in a statement. “This commitment has contributed to the remarkable statistic of over 18 million cancer survivors currently living in the U.S. today.”

The cut to cancer research is part of a roughly $18 billion reduction at the National Institutes of Health that Mr. Trump revealed earlier this month, as the White House aims to consolidate health agencies and their research centers.

Democrats immediately rebuked Mr. Trump on Friday for the deep proposed cuts to domestic programs.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s appropriations panel, described the blueprint as a “draconian proposal to hurt working people and our economy, and it is dead on arrival in Congress as long as I have anything to say about it.”

The White House did not include some key details in its updated budget, including estimates of tax revenues, and it did not offer a full set of spending proposals for the Pentagon, though it promised those in June. The omissions also angered Democrats, who said the timing and nature of the administration’s blueprint — released late on a Friday — only served to highlight the magnitude of its proposed cuts.

Mr. Trump and his budget director, Russell T. Vought, “are clearly hiding their policy goals, because they would hurt the middle class, the working class and the vulnerable,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who leads her party on the House Appropriations Committee.

Republicans are also racing to advance a package of tax cuts that could include additional reductions in federal spending. And the White House plans to send Congress a separate request next week to claw back about $9 billion in funds that lawmakers previously authorized, predominantly targeting money for public broadcasting and foreign aid.

Mr. Vought described the spending targeted for rescission this week as “waste and garbage,” and signaled the administration would seek to rescind other funds. He said the focus is on funds identified by the Department of Government Efficiency, the team of aides known as DOGE until recently overseen by the tech billionaire Elon Musk.

“We are doing everything we can to make the DOGE cuts permanent,” Mr. Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget, told Fox Business this week.

Mr. Vought added that the president could also try to halt some enacted funding on his own, using an authority known as impoundment to bypass Congress on spending. The budget director said that option was “still on the table.” But using it could presage a major battle over the power of the nation’s purse, which the Constitution affords to lawmakers.

Christina Jewett contributed reporting.