Trump questions funding social programs as he calls for defense budget increase

President Donald Trump said it’s not possible for America to pay for child day care, Medicaid, Medicare and other social services. Those comments came in the same week the president proposed a large increase in defense spending.

Trump’s comments

The president made those comments while speaking at an Easter luncheon. The White House posted a video of Trump speaking at the event on their YouTube page before deleting it.

He claimed it should be up to the states to provide for many social services.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said, according to NBC News. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

Experts SAN spoke with disagreed with the president’s thoughts.

“It’s basically crazy,” Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told SAN. “Of course, the federal government can, and has been, funding Medicare, Medicaid. We provided some funding for child care. We could easily provide more.”

The federal government currently spends around $30 billion on child care.

“It’s preposterous,” William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, told SAN about Trump’s comments. “It’s a self-inflicted wound.”

The president suggested that states raise taxes to pay for things like day care for kids.

“We’re fighting wars,” Trump said, according to The Hill. “We can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to make up for it.”

Can the U.S. afford to pay for social services and fund a foreign war like the one in Iran?

“If we’re to say, let’s keep the spending in place on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the other major programs, those are the biggies, keep it in place and raise the military budget by $500 billion and not raise any taxes,” Baker said. “It gets close. We already have a really large budget deficit.”

Response to Trump

There are more than 66 million Americans on Medicare and another 75 million on Medicaid. Medicaid costs the federal government nearly $1 trillion each year, while Medicare’s price tag is more than $1 trillion.

Meanwhile, 14% of families in America spend more on day care than housing.

Despite that, there’s been a relatively muted response to the president questioning whether the government can pay for these services.

“I think there’s a bit of numbing,” Hartung said. “There’s so many changes, so many terrible policies flying at people. I think they’re having a hard time getting their footing. I was amazed when I was looking at what we’re spending on the Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control, that essentially this year, they’re trying to cut their budgets in half. And I would assume that alone would be a huge outcry, but there’s so many of those things that I think people are just a bit numb to it.”

Some Democratic lawmakers did respond, including Rep. Ro Khanna from California who posted on X.

“Trump says we can pay for war in Iran but can’t afford childcare,” he wrote. “Mr. President, the billions you wasted in Iran could pay for $10 day childcare for every American family with childcare workers paid $25 an hour.”

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut posted a clip of Trump’s comments, saying “This is what we run on this fall.”

The experts SAN spoke with said American taxpayers should not be happy with the president’s suggestions.

“I think people should be outraged,” Baker said.

“Outrage” was also the word used by Hartung when asked about how people should feel.

Defense budget

Trump has now suggested inflating the defense budget to $1.5 trillion, a roughly 63% increase from last year’s defense budget.

America already spends more on defense than the next four highest spending countries combined.

“No serious person was worried that our military was inadequate in 2024, 2025, and now he’s telling us we need to increase it by two-thirds,” Baker said. “And now we can’t pay for health care. We can’t pay for childcare.”

Baker added there’s a good bit of “irony” in this. A word that’s being used to describe Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent comments.

“Imagine in Iran that instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran, you’d have a much different country,” Rubio said.

The U.S. has already spent more than $12 billion on the ongoing war in Iran. Time Magazine put together a list of what that money could’ve been used for stateside.

That list includes health care for more than one million Americans for one year, a full year of food assistance for 5.5 million Americans, housing assistance for one million Americans, childcare or universal pre-k for 900,000 children and much more.

“President Eisenhower basically said strength is based on a healthy, well-educated population that’s unified and motivated by the same values, and this administration has taken a hammer to all those pillars of security and throwing all the money at the military and military contractors,” Hartung said.

Despite running on an ‘America First’ platform, this move to curb spending at home and continue funding a foreign war appears to be the exact opposite of that.

“I think it was really Donald Trump first, and he got himself into a mess here because, I believe he thought this would be more like Venezuela,” Hartung said. “It would be a quick hit. They depose one leader, cut a deal with another one. He didn’t expect this to turn into a region-wide war, and since he can’t admit his mistakes, he’s doubled down on some terrible ideas.”

In order to increase that defense budget, the president will need approval from Congress.

It’s unclear if there’s enough support for such a massive spending increase.

“The ball is in the court of Congress,” Hartung said. “Now, they could deny the increase. They could increase some of the programs that have been cut, but often they do half measures. He asked for $1.5 trillion, which is an unprecedented sum that they probably couldn’t even spend, and if he settles for $1.1 trillion, that’s still too much.”

The president will likely need to present his argument to Congress.

“He controls both houses,” Baker said. “So presumably, if he had a good case, he could make it and probably get some Democrats too. But just to say, now we need all this extra money because I went out and made enemies, irony is being generous.”

While Trump’s Republican Party does have slim majorities in both chambers, Republicans don’t have the numbers in the U.S. Senate to overcome a filibuster.

Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief