Background Press Call by Administration Officials on the President’s Discretionary Funding Request for Fiscal Year 2022

9:03 A.M. EDT

MR. FRIEDLANDER: Good morning, everyone. This is Rob from the OMB communications team. Thanks so much for joining us. This will be an on-background conference call about the President’s discretionary funding request for fiscal year 2022.

For your awareness but not for reporting purposes, today we’ll be joined by [administration officials].

We’ll begin with some brief comments from [administration official], and then we’ll open it up for a few questions. As a reminder, today’s call will be conducted on background, attributable to “administration officials,” and embargoed until 11:00 a.m. Eastern time today.

And with that, I will turn it over to [administration official].

ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  All right. Thanks, everyone, for joining the call. As you know, today we’re sending Congress the President’s discretionary funding request for fiscal year 2022. We wanted to provide you with an overview of the request and talk about how it fits into the President’s broader agenda.

Our goal in releasing the discretionary request is to provide Congress with the guidance it needs to begin the appropriations process. This is the process by which Congress determines how taxpayer dollars should be invested in priorities like education, public health, housing, and other areas on an annual basis.

This year’s appropriations process comes at a particularly important moment. For the past decade, due to overly restrictive budget caps, our country has underinvested in core public services, benefits, and protections that are incredibly important to our success.

Since 2010, non-defense discretionary funding has shrunk significantly as a share of the U.S. economy. For example, going into the pandemic, funding for the CDC was 10 percent lower than a decade ago, adjusted for inflation. We’re underinvested in programs like Head Start, which served 95,000 fewer children today than it did a decade ago.

Despite the growing threat of climate change, we’ve cut funding for climate science and technology at EPA by 27 percent since FY2010, adjusted for inflation. The list goes on.

The administration believes that now is the time to begin reversing this trend and reinvesting in the foundations of our country’s strength. And let me take a few moments to highlight key investments in the request, and then I can briefly walk through some of the topline numbers.

The request includes a historic investment in high-poverty schools, with a total of $36.5 billion in Title I grants. This is the largest year-over-year increase since the inception of the Title I program. It includes six and a half billion dollars to launch the Advanced Research Projects Agencies for Health — or “ARPA-H.” That investment would have an initial focus on cancer and diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and ultimately help drive transformational innovation in health research.

It proposes $8.7 billion to help support core public health capacity at CDC, which represents the biggest budget authority increase in nearly two decades. It invests in tackling the climate crisis — with an increase of more than $14 billion compared to fiscal year 2021 — across nearly every agency to help restore the capacity needed to carry out core climate functions; to secure environmental justice for communities that have been left behind; and to develop — and to help developing countries reduce emissions and adapt to climate.

The request would extend Housing Choice Vouchers to more than 200,000 additional households and provide a $500 million increase for Homeless Assistance Grants to support more than 100,000 additional households.

It includes $2.1 billion to help the Department of Justice address the gun violence public health crisis through support for existing programs to improve background checks as well as a series of new programs.

And it includes funding to help end gender-based violence with $1 billion in total funding for the Violence Against Women Act programs — nearly double the 2021-enacted level.

Those are just a few highlights. So what does this mean in terms of topline funding levels? Overall, the President’s request includes $769 billion for non-defense discretionary spending. That’s a 16 percent increase over fiscal year 2021 enacted levels.

That level of investment will return this category of spending to 3.3 percent of GDP, roughly the historical average over the last 30 years. The discretionary request also provides $753 billion for national defense programs — a 1.7 percent increase over the fiscal year 2021 enacted level.

I want to be clear that the request does not include mandatory proposals or tax reforms. Again, what we’re talking about here is the proposal for fiscal year 2022 discretionary funding only.

As is standard during transition years, we will release the President’s budget in the months ahead, which will include detailed discretionary proposals, mandatory proposals, and tax reforms as part of a fiscally and economically responsible plan to address the challenges we face.

Now, this discretionary request is obviously one piece of the puzzle. Last week, you heard the President outline the American Jobs Plan — a comprehensive strategy to create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country’s infrastructure, and position America to outcompete China.

The discretionary request is a complementary but separate proposal that lays out the President’s funding recommendations for the annual appropriations process. We want to use every lever at our disposal to address the challenges we face. And again, the budget we released in the coming months will put forward a unified agenda for the country that will pull all of these pieces together.

With that, we’ll be happy to take a few questions.


 * Q Thanks so much for taking my question. There’s always this feeling that presidential budgets don’t get passed as they are.  And I wonder if you could walk through what the President — I mean, I know you’re not going to negotiate here, but what are items that maybe he sees as things that are deal breakers that he wants to see with those numbers.  And then, overall, could you talk a bit about what he hopes Congress takes away from this budget, given his priorities?
 * ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes.  Thanks so much for the question.  [Redacted.]


 * Q Hi, thanks for taking my question. You kind of looked at this at the end of your remarks, but could you talk a little bit about how much of this proposal reflects spending that would be included in the President’s infrastructure package?  Does it include any of it or is it like completely separate?  Could you maybe give us a little more detail on that?
 * ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes.  I would go with the “separate” part of your comment as — as the first takeaway I hope you have.  It is separate, certainly complementary.  And what you will see later in the spring when we release the full budget is the administration pulling all of these pieces together to show our total fiscal economic plan, as a budget would normally do.


 * Q Good morning. Thanks for doing this.  I’ve got a couple of questions for you.  One is on the timetable.  When do you anticipate the full budget will be (inaudible)?
 * ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yeah, thanks for that.  And I’ll go back to my opening remarks.  We are trying to get non-defense discretionary back to its 30-year historical average.  Clearly, over the last 10 years, that was reduced.  We think it’s appropriate to return that spending back to its 30-year average.  So that is what the intention here is.


 * Q Hi, thanks so much for doing this. I just wanted to ask&colon; This $100 billion or so increase that would add up to over a trillion over a decade — is the expectation that that’s going to be paid for?  I know that the tax part will not come until the full proposal.  But is that something that President Biden is expecting to do to cover that?
 * ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: So, I’ll start off by talking about the last part of your question on OCO.  As you know, many — both sides of the aisle considered Overseas Contingency a budgetary gimmick, given that, you know, many of the overseas operations that they supported had been around for many, many years.  So we had bipartisan interest in ensuring that those things were accomplished in the baseline defense budget.  That’s what you’ll see presented from us today.  So there will be no — no OCO.
 * ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Sure.  With respect to your question about paying for the discretionary funding levels here: You know, later this spring, we’ll release our full budget, which will include discretionary and mandatory taxes and will show how the full agenda fits together in an economically and fiscally responsible whole.
 * MR. FRIEDLANDER: Great.  And I think we’ll have time for one more question.


 * Q Good morning. Thanks for doing this.  We’ve heard, over the course of the transition and early in the administration, discussion of how the lack of cooperation from the outgoing administration hampered your ability to, sort of, get to what we would call a “skinny budget” at this point.
 * ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thanks for that.  I mean, look, we — I think the President, you know, I think took an unprecedented step in calling out — OMB was one of those agencies that we would have loved to see more historic cooperation during transition, including, you know, allowing — the past administration did not allow the staff to work with us on budget development, which past administrations had done during transition.
 * MR. FRIEDLANDER: Great.  And thanks so much, everyone.  I think we’ll have to leave it there for today, but really appreciate everyone joining us.

Just a final reminder: The contents of this call are embargoed until 11:00 a.m. Eastern and attributable to “administration officials.”

Please feel free to get in touch with the communications team if you have any additional questions, and we’ll — we’ll do our best to get back to you.

And with that, hope everyone has a great Friday and a great weekend. Thanks very much.

9:22 A.M. EDT