Government
R.I.P.: Donald Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Wall'
With its 2018 budget request, the White House begins the process of admitting that the president’s signature promise was a fantasy.
President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget proposal included cuts for everything: housing, food stamps, infrastructure, the environment. No program or line item was too slight to escape the guillotine. Even the federal budget for bicycle trails, once discovered, got hacked to bits.
Trump’s own promises and priorities were not spared, either. The most glaring cut of all came in the request for the president’s “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border of the U.S. with Mexico. In the 2018 budget, the White House asks Congress for $1.6 billion to build part of the wall. That’s down a billion dollars from the preliminary request in March, a hasty retreat.