What's in Biden's Budget Proposal -- Update

By Gabriel T. Rubin

The Biden administration on Friday released a budget outline for fiscal year 2022 that highlights the president's policy priorities, calling for increases in spending on education, healthcare and renewable energy.

President Biden's budget outline calls for Congress to approve $1.52 trillion in discretionary federal spending next year. Excluding emergency measures last year tied to the coronavirus pandemic, the request would boost base discretionary spending by 8.4%, or $118 billion, from the $1.4 trillion authorized in fiscal 2021.

The document is an opening step in the federal budgeting process, with much haggling and input from Congress to come. Mr. Biden is expected to release a more detailed budget proposal later this spring. The initial blueprint, however, serves as a statement of the new administration's priorities.

Here is what is in the Biden administration's budget outline:

DEFENSE:

Mr. Biden's requested increases are heavily weighted toward nondefense programs, with nondefense discretionary spending growing by 16% over the 2021 enacted level. Defense programs would grow by 1.7%, less than many Republicans wanted, but more than some progressives who advocated cuts to military spending would have preferred.

The Biden administration said the request "would restore nondefense discretionary funding to 3.3% of GDP, roughly equal to the historical average over the last 30 years" while emphasizing soft-power components of defense like diplomacy and economic development.

The White House's budget outline cites deterring China, defense technology research and improving long-range missile capabilities as top priorities, along with modernizing nuclear weapons systems and an increased focus on threats like infectious diseases and the effects of climate change.

HEALTH:

Mr. Biden's healthcare proposal calls for a new research agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, modeled on previous advanced research units at the Defense and Energy Departments. The new one would get an initial $6.5 billion outlay to focus on cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would get $8.7 billion, a $1.6 billion increase from 2021 and the largest single-year increase in almost two decades, under Mr. Biden's proposal. The increased funding would focus on building up "core public health capacity" in states, modernizing data collection and employing more epidemiologists, all of which the administration said were responses to deficiencies exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The budget outline requests an additional $3.9 billion to deal with the opioid crisis, more than 50% more funding than last year for HIV prevention, and it would more than double funding for mental-health block-grant programs. For veterans' healthcare, the budget calls for an 8.5% increase with targeted funding for suicide prevention, mental-health care and aid for homeless veterans. It would also provide a $2.2 billion increase in funding for the Indian Health Service.

IMMIGRATION:

Mr. Biden set a goal of resettling up to 125,000 refugees in 2022, up from former President Donald Trump's cap of 15,000 for the current fiscal year. The $4.3 billion request for refugee services includes a goal of providing better services for unaccompanied minors and expediting the process of uniting them with relatives and removing them from U.S. custody.

The request includes money for border security modernization to screen for human, drug and weapons trafficking. It calls for no new funds for a border wall and requests the cancellation of any unused funds for the wall. The outline does call for funds to increase security and economic support for Central American nations.

EDUCATION:

The Education Department would get the largest increase of any cabinet department, around 40% over fiscal year 2021. The budget outline would increase federal education funding for low-income schools to $36.5 billion from $20 billion in 2021, with the goal of narrowing the achievement gap between low-income and wealthier school districts. A program to aid students with disabilities would get a $2.6 billion bump to $15.5 billion, as well as more money for early child care and Head Start preschool programs.

Pell grants would also see a boost, with the maximum grant amount raised by $400. That is far short of Mr. Biden's goal of doubling the grant amount, which currently has a maximum of $6,495, but the administration called it a "significant first step."

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT:

The budget outline sprinkles climate policy throughout, in line with Mr. Biden's goal of turning the entire government's attention to the issue. The 61-page document mentions "climate" 151 times. The document calls for increased funds for lowering carbon and methane pollution, tax credits for clean energy, conservation incentives for farmers, increased disaster funding and funds for climate-related research. The proposal would reboot the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps with the goal of conserving 30% of U.S. land and waters by 2030. The outline also supports the goal of creating 250,000 jobs to remediate abandoned mines and oil and gas wells.

Mr. Biden also wants outlays for training workers for jobs in the clean-energy sector and a more than fourfold increase for international climate programs, to $2.5 billion. It instructs the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take climate resilience into account for its projects. And it directs over $110 million to the Environmental Protection Agency to hire staff, after the agency lost more than 1,000 staffers during the Trump era, according to the Biden administration.

JUSTICE:

Civil-rights and policing programs would receive increases from current funding levels, as would hate-crime prosecution and voting-rights protection efforts. The request for the Justice Department includes $2.1 billion -- a $232 million increase -- for gun background checks and to provide incentives for voluntary gun buyback programs and state adoption of gun licensing laws.

Funding for Violence Against Women Act programs would be nearly doubled. The budget also invests $1.4 billion in environmental justice programs, mostly through the EPA, to clean up pollution, monitor air quality and support job creation in affected areas.

The proposal also includes $232 million across the Justice and Homeland Security departments for combating domestic terrorism, an issue the Biden administration has said is a priority, particularly after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The outline includes a $45 million boost to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and $40 million to U.S. attorneys to manage increasing caseloads. Homeland Security would receive $20 million to spend on grants to build out community efforts to address terrorism and "targeted violence," a continuation of a program that in the final months of the Trump presidency was increasingly geared toward combating white supremacists and other far-right extremists.

TRANSPORTATION:

Most of the Transportation Department's funding isn't discretionary and comes from the Highway Trust Fund. Still, Mr. Biden's budget calls for a 35% increase in Amtrak funding and a new competitive grant program for local passenger rail. It calls for increases to public transit funding and grants for no- and low-emission buses.

TAXES:

The outline doesn't include a detailed discussion of taxes, as the full budget request Mr. Biden expects to release later this year will. But it does request a 10.4% increase in funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which the administration and former IRS officials believe will result in higher compliance rates and will allow for more oversight of wealthy and corporate taxpayers. Enforcement is the primary focus of the funding increase, though the budget also requests more tools for taxpayers to communicate directly with the IRS to get their questions answered.

AGRICULTURE:

The Agriculture Department would see a 16% funding increase, with significant additional funding for priorities like rural broadband, improving rural water infrastructure and improving forest management to prevent forest fires. Experts say thinning dense forests is the most effective short-term tool to address the fires. Most scientific experts also say warmer weather across the West caused by climate change has greatly worsened the fire threat.

The budget would also allocate more money toward developing agricultural technologies to help farmers boost their output while also pursuing conservation initiatives and sequestering carbon on their land.

A major part of the Agriculture Department's budget goes to nutrition programs: food stamps would receive $6.7 billion under Mr. Biden's request, a $1 billion increase from this year's enacted level.

SPACE PROGRAMS:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration would get a 6.3% funding bump to support human and robotic exploration of the moon and Mars. Mr. Biden also calls for additional funding for aeronautics research and climate science, including beefing up climate satellite monitoring programs.

--Rachael Levy contributed to this article.

Write to Gabriel T. Rubin at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

04-09-21 1319ET