Last Monday, the White House's Office of Budget and Management (OMB) released U.S. President Donald Trump's budget proposal for the 2019 fiscal year. The $4.4 trillion budget would increase spending on military and border security, while implementing large cuts in funding to domestic programs, including Medicare, a federal government program that provides health coverage to seniors.

Though Trump's budget will be likely ignored by Congress, which controls the federal government's spending, the budget is revealing as a reflection of Trump's priorities for the remainder of his term. "This is a messaging document," said OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, when asked about Congress's response to the budget proposal. "The executive budget has always been a messaging document."

In addition to cuts to Medicare, Trump's proposed budget would reverse the expansion of Medicaid enacted by the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, passed under President Obama. During the campaign, Trump had promised to leave Medicaid and Medicare untouched in his planned shrinking of federal spending. However, after so far unsuccessfully seeking a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Trump is moving to reduce the effectiveness of ACA initiatives.

Trump's proposed increase in spending on immigration and border security would allocate $25 billion over two years to addressing perceived immigration problems. Trump asks for $18 billion to be spent to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in the southern U.S. In addition to funding for a wall, Trump has also called for increased spending to hire 2,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and 750 more border patrol agents. Both ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) would have their budgets increase by 27% under Trump's budget.

While the Department of Homeland Security would see an overall increase in funding under the president's proposal, the budgets of other federal agencies and departments would be slashed significantly. In his budget proposal, Trump calls for a 25% cut in spending on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which he has long disparaged as unnecessary and harmful to business. This marks the second year that Trump has proposed reducing the budget of the EPA, an agency that he had proposed eliminating while on the campaign trail. Trump's budget would also decrease funding to the State Department by 27%.

The White House's budget also focuses spending on improving and maintaining infrastructure and addressing the opioid epidemic in the U.S. $17 billion would be allocated to increasing drug enforcement and expanding treatment for opioid addiction.

The budget outlines a large $1.5-trillion infrastructure plan to be enacted over ten years. Aimed at improving existing roads and bridges, as well as implementing other development projects, the plan would require the cooperation of both state and local governments as well as private-sector companies. Of the projected $1.5 trillion to be spent, the federal government would take on $200 billion of the cost as seed money, with the remainder of the funding coming from state and local governments and private companies.