Devex: Trump’s ‘America first’ budget slashes foreign aid, multilateral funding
“President Donald Trump’s first budget proposes … cuts to the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department and recommends slashing funding to the United Nations. The draft budget, which was released Thursday morning, reveals plans to stop U.S. funding for U.N. climate change deals, but will preserve support for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and meet commitments made to the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance…” (Edwards, 3/16).

New York Times: Pentagon Grows, While EPA and State Dept. Shrink in Trump’s Budget
“President Trump will send a budget to Congress on Thursday that sharply reorders the nation’s priorities by spending billions of dollars on defending the southern border and bolstering the Pentagon while severely cutting funds for foreign aid, poverty programs, and the environment…” (Rappeport/Thrush, 3/16).

New York Times: Who Wins and Loses in Trump’s Proposed Budget
“President Trump released a partial outline of his 2018 budget on Thursday, proposing billions of dollars in spending cuts to most government agencies to pay for large increases in military and homeland security spending, resulting in a 1.2 percent cut in discretionary spending over all” (Parlapiano/Aisch, 3/16).

Reuters: Military wins in first Trump budget; environment, aid lose big
“…Trump’s budget outline is a bare-bones plan covering just ‘discretionary’ spending for the 2018 fiscal year starting on Oct. 1. It is the first volley in what is expected to be an intense battle over spending in coming months in Congress, which holds the federal purse strings and seldom approves presidents’ budget plans…” (Rampton, 3/16).

Reuters: Trump plans 28 percent cut in budget for State Department, USAID
“… ‘It is time to prioritize the security and wellbeing of Americans, and to ask the rest of the world to step up and pay its fair share,’ Trump said in a letter introducing his budget, which calls for large increases in U.S. defense spending. ‘This is a “hard power” budget. It is not a “soft power” budget,’ Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, told reporters, referring to the president’s desire to prioritize military power over the influence that can flow from development aid…” (Mohammed et al., 3/16).

ScienceInsider: NIH, DOE Office of Science face deep cuts in Trump’s first budget
“President Donald Trump’s first budget request to Congress, to be released at 7 a.m. Thursday, will call for cutting the 2018 budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by $6 billion, or nearly 20 percent, according to sources familiar with the proposal. … The NIH proposal is drawing deep concern from biomedical research advocates…” (3/16).

Wall Street Journal: Trump Budget Seeks Big Cuts to Environment, Arts, Foreign Aid
“…The budget proposal is certain to run into stiff opposition in Congress, where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have already signaled they are unlikely to enact Mr. Trump’s deep cuts when they pass spending bills that actually fund the government. … The budget proposal is the administration’s opening salvo for the 2018 budget process. Congress, however, still has not finished appropriations for fiscal 2017 — current spending legislation only funds the government through April 28…” (Sparshott et al., 3/16).

Washington Post: Trump federal budget 2018: Massive cuts to the arts, science and the poor
“…Republicans have objected, for example, to the large cuts in foreign aid and diplomacy that Trump has foreshadowed, and his budget whacks foreign aid programs run by the Education, State, and Treasury departments, among others. ‘The administration’s budget isn’t going to be the budget,’ said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). ‘We do the budget here. The administration makes recommendations, but Congress does budgets’…” (Paletta et al., 3/16).

Washington Post: NIH would see huge budget cut under president’s proposal
“…The plan ‘includes a major reorganization’ of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers and would eliminate the Fogarty International Center, a [$69.2] million program dedicated to building partnerships between health research institutions in the United States and abroad…” (Bernstein, 3/16).