President Trump’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2020 seeks to cut overall nondefense discretionary spending by 5% from this year’s level, a plan that, if carried out, wouldn’t bode well for most federal infrastructure and construction programs, which fall into that category. At the same time, the White House again used the budget rollout to recommend a big, long-range infrastructure investment package.
In the near term, the president’s 2020 budget request, released on March 11, includes cuts for some key construction accounts, partly because his plan doesn’t maintain most of a $10-billion-plus boost in overall infrastructure spending contained in a two-year, bipartisan House-Senate budget deal reached in February 2018.