Don't expect Congress to pass Trump's controversial budget plan

After taking a break next week for Memorial Day, the Republican-controlled Congress will start to craft federal spending plans for next year — but they will not be starting with the budget blueprint President Trump is sending over Tuesday.

Trump's budget plan sets out dramatic spending cuts and a bold plan to squeeze savings out of entitlement programs such as Medicaid, but it is a long way from being enacted.

"The president's budget has never been the starting point for anything as long as I've been here," said Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee now in his 11th year in Congress.

"I don't think there's much chance of this budget going anywhere based on how Republicans talked about the skinny budget," he added, referring to a slimmed-down outline of the plan that Trump released in March.

Read more:

6 things to watch in Trump's first full budget plan

The 62 agencies and programs Trump wants to eliminate

Congress usually starts its drafting process each year with the existing budget and makes additions or subtractions from that. If it keeps to that practice, it will be starting with a plan that passed with bipartisan support earlier this month, one Democrats believe many Republicans would not mind sticking to for another year.

But the dynamics of the Republican majority, with the staunchest conservatives often uniting to insist on shrinking the government, probably will lead to some of Trump's proposals "bleeding into the budget we're going to deal with in a few weeks," Yarmuth said. For example, he said he does not expect the House to draft a plan with a $200 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or food stamps, but he does expect there to be some money cut from SNAP.

This budget will be dead on arrival with Democrats — if early reports on its contents are any indication — and should be with the bipartisan majority that approved the package of spending bills three weeks ago, said Roy Loewenstein, a spokesman for Rep. Nita Lowey of New York. Lowey, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, would work with committee Republicans to improve afterschool education programs, invest in medical research and maintain national security, he said.

“But Democrats won’t accept any spending proposals or appropriations bills with poison pill policy riders or that slash critical programs that support working American families,” Loewenstein said.

And it is not just Democrats who are skeptical of Trump's broad strokes.

Interest groups began organizing after the preliminary version of Tuesday's budget released in March proposed eliminating dozens of programs. Members of Congress in both parties — who jealously guard their constitutional power to allocate funding — quickly said the president was free to propose what he wanted, but they would decide what gets funded and what does not.

"Some of the large cuts, I don’t think will be sustained by the majorities in the House," House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., told a telephone town hall with constituents on March 20.

He specifically rejected Trump's call to cut public broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Institutes of Health. And he took a swipe at former congressman Mick Mulvaney, now Trump's budget director.

"I think Mulvaney, quite honestly, and he's not one of my favorite people, I never worked with him when he was in Congress, he has no idea of the facts," Frelinghuysen said.

The Library of Congress is filled with budget proposals that presidents sent to Capitol Hill and never saw again in the form of legislation. Even with a House and Senate controlled by fellow Republicans, Trump’s plans could face the same fate.

“It’s true of any president’s budget that somebody on the Hill is going to say, 'It’s dead on arrival,' ” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “And with the cuts envisioned and changes to entitlement programs, this one may be deader than most.”

Mulvaney will go before the House and Senate Budget committees this week, and members of Trump's Cabinet will testify before other committees that set policies for their departments. All will likely be pressed to defend the cuts under questioning from some of the lawmakers who wrote the laws creating programs slated for elimination.

Ellis said his group for years has supported some of the cuts Trump is proposing, such as the elimination of the Appalachian Regional Commission and similar regional economic development organizations that survive because of their popularity with local members of Congress.

"It all depends how hard the president and his allies going to push," Ellis said. "It's easy to make cuts on paper, what really is the measure of the administration is what they will fight for on the Hill."

Trump was already rebuffed in his first budget battle, when Congress largely ignored his call to cut $18 billion from domestic spending in the budget for the remainder of this fiscal year, which runs through Sept. 30. That battle pushed up against the deadline to pass a spending bill earlier this month to avoid a partial shutdown of the government, and Trump lashed out on Twitter after seeing news coverage saying Democrats had won, saying "Our country needs a good 'shutdown' in September."

Under what is almost reverentially referred to as "regular order" on Capitol Hill, the budget process is supposed to work this way: The president sends a budget to the Hill, the Budget committees draft a resolution setting top spending levels for various departments, and then the 12 appropriations subcommittees write detailed spending bills on how much each department and agency gets for programs. But that process calls for the Budget committees to pass their resolution by April 15, so the appropriators can write and pass their bills before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

Yarmuth said he could not see the House passing a budget resolution before the end of June, meaning appropriators would only get started in July, and Congress is due to be in recess for all of August.

Stan Collender, a former staffer on both the House and Senate Budget committees who is now a vice president at the communications firm MLSGroup Qorvis, said he does not expect spending bills to be passed until December at the earliest.

"The president's budget is just a proposal," Collender said. "Congress can ignore it, adopt it, change it, do whatever they want to. It does not have any more meaning any other piece of proposed legislation."

Contributing: Nicole Gaudiano