President Releases FY2021 Budget Proposal Featuring Pay Raise, Agency Cuts

The White House has released the President’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 budget request complete with sweeping agency cuts and some new reorganization proposals. While the budget request rarely translates into law due to compromises in Congress, it does signal the president’s priorities for the year.

In the FY 2021 Budget for America’s Future, President Trump calls upon agencies to “reduce wasteful, unnecessary spending, and to fix mismanagement and redundancy across agencies.” To further this aim, the White House proposes spending cuts to several major agencies and the reskilling of large portions of the workforce to prepare for the future of work.

In a call with stakeholders, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget Margaret Weichert explained the White House’s mission to reskill 400,000 federal employees. The budget provides the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with additional funds to “lead a government-wide cybersecurity workforce program for all Federal cyber professionals, including an interagency cyber rotational program, a cybersecurity training program for all Federal cyber professionals, and a cyber-reskilling academy.”

The budget contains significant spending cuts to agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (down 26 percent from FY 2020), the Department of the Interior (down 16 percent from FY 2020), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (down 15 percent from FY 2020). The agency with the largest cut is the Department of Commerce, which is proposed to be down 48 percent from FY 2020 due to the conclusion of the decennial census.

The president proposes to expand the budget for the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Homeland Security, and Treasury.

The budget also proposes moving the U.S. Secret Service out of DHS and back to the Department of the Treasury, where the law enforcement entity was housed before the creation of DHS.

The budget provides federal employees with a 1 percent pay raise in FY 2021 and encourages agencies to increase awards compensation by 1 percent.

The budget also includes $2 billion in funding for the president’s border wall, a subject of contention which triggered a shutdown in 2018. The proposal also includes $3.1 billion for an additional 60,000 detention beds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities and additional funding for hiring more ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers.

Congressional budget committees will now meet to review the proposal and decide on their own budgets for each agency. Both chambers of Congress and the president will have to agree on a final budget and appropriations plan to fund the government before the end of the fiscal year.