WASHINGTON—President Joe Biden on March 11 released his $7.3 trillion budget for fiscal year 2025 that calls for significant tax increases for the wealthy and corporations.
The request features cost-cutting measures for families, building affordable housing, and investing in American manufacturing in line with previous years. It also includes funding for the administration’s equity initiatives across the U.S. government.
President Biden’s budget proposal would reduce the federal deficit by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade, in line with the deficit reduction proposed by the president last year.
The $7.3 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2025 is a 4.7 percent increase over the current year’s budget. It proposes to increase defense spending by 1.8 percent and non-defense discretionary spending by 2.8 percent.
President Biden’s plan was sent to Congress, which has “power of the purse.” However, it is widely seen as a political messaging document and is unlikely to become law.
Progressive Tax Hikes
The president emphasizes higher taxes on the ultra-rich and corporations to help pay for his spending proposals, as in 2024. He calls for a 25 percent minimum tax on households earning more than $100 million. In addition, the plan seeks to partly repeal former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, raising the top individual tax rate to 39.6 percent from 37 percent and the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent.
He also proposes increasing the corporate minimum tax rate to 21 percent from 15 percent. The minimum tax enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023 currently requires corporations with more than $1 billion in revenue to pay federal tax of at least 15 percent of their profits.
The budget also proposes “reforming the international tax system” by raising the tax rate on U.S. multinational firms’ foreign earnings to 21 percent from 10.5 percent. The president states that he wants to “reduce the incentives to book profits in low-tax jurisdictions, stopping corporate inversions to tax havens.”
The blueprint calls for a quadrupling of the 1 percent tax on stock buybacks that went into effect last year, which the White House claims would “address the continued tax advantage for buybacks and encourage corporations to invest in productivity and the broader economy.”
He also calls for higher taxes for companies, by denying deductions for all compensation “over $1 million paid to any employee of a C corporation.” This way the president wants to discourage corporations from giving their employees “massive pay packages.”
“Half of our tax increase would come from rates going up for corporations. The other half are on the top 1 to 2 percent of this country,” White House budget director Shalanda Young told reporters during a conference call on March 11.
“Do you really think the wealthy and big corporations need another $2 trillion in tax breaks?” President Biden asked during his State of the Union address on March 7. “I sure don’t. I’m going to keep fighting like hell to make it fair.”
He also said he wouldn’t increase taxes for those earning less than $400,000.
The Trump campaign issued a statement criticizing the president’s plan.
Defense and Veterans Affairs
The budget would implement cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs while pushing for increased spending related to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.The VA’s discretionary spending is slated to face a cut of more than 4 percent, or roughly $5.6 billion.
The Department of Defense, meanwhile, would see an increase of more than 4 percent in discretionary spending, to combat threats in Gaza, Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific.
The budget also calls on Congress to pass the Senate-approved version of the president’s supplemental spending request, which would allocate more than $90 billion in security-related spending designed to strengthen Israel, Ukraine, and the United States’ presence in the Pacific.
While that supplemental bill passed the Senate with a strong bipartisan majority, it has stalled in the House, where lawmakers have become wary of plummeting domestic sentiment for foreign military entanglements.
President’s Other Priorities
The budget provides $1.4 billion for STEM education and workforce development programs at the National Science Foundation that have an emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, or DEI.DEI has been a contentious point among Republicans and conservatives. The GOP-controlled House has tried to eliminate the DEI programs with little success.
The budget funds voluntary, universal, free preschool for all 4 million of the nation’s 4-year-olds and charts a path to expand preschool to 3-year-olds.
It’s investing nearly $1.5 billion across the Environmental Protection Agency in support of environmental justice efforts.
The budget also includes $7.8 billion for the Artemis program, which would bring astronauts—including the first women, first people of color, and first international astronauts—to the lunar surface as part of a long-term journey of science and exploration.
The budget includes $17.7 billion, an increase of $1.1 billion above the 2023 enacted level and $2.6 billion above the 2021 enacted level, for Department of Justice law enforcement, including $2 billion for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to: effectively investigate and prosecute gun crimes; expand multijurisdictional gun trafficking strike forces; increase regulation of the firearms industry; bolster crime-solving ballistics, gunshot residue, and other forensic technologies as well as analysts; and implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
The budget provides $51 million to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to support the continued implementation of enhanced background checks, a key provision of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
These requests for DOJ and FBI are expected to come under fire by Republicans, who have accused the agencies of being weaponized against conservatives and former President Donald Trump, who faces two federal indictments in addition to his cases in New York and Georgia.
The budget proposes a $4.7 billion contingency fund to aid the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its components when responding to migration surges along the Southwest border.
The blueprint also includes, and therefore reiterates the need for, the unmet needs from the October 2023 supplemental request. In addition to urgent requirements, the request includes investments to build longer-term capacity in the areas of border security, immigration enforcement, and countering fentanyl, totaling $2.9 billion for DHS.
These requests come amid the humanitarian and national security crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, where there have been more than 8 million Border Patrol encounters since President Biden took office.
The budget invests $65 million with the Commerce Department to safeguard, regulate, and promote AI, including protecting the American public against its societal risks.
AI has become a focal point, with platforms including ChatGPT being popular. Congress has had multiple briefings about AI and could craft legislation to deal with AI, such as avoiding deepfakes and other misinformation.
The budget provides $162 million to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), a $22 million increase above the 2023 enacted level (significant amid the rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the ongoing Hamas-Israel war).
This increase is significant amid the rise in antisemitism on college campuses following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the ongoing Hamas-Israel war.
The budget includes $10.6 billion in the Department of Energy’s climate and clean energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment programs, an increase of 12 percent above the 2023 enacted level.
The president’s budget plan, which outlines his financial priorities, holds special symbolic significance this year as he seeks reelection.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are still struggling to fund the government for fiscal year 2024. They need to pass a second funding package of six bills, including one for defense, by the March 22 deadline.
