President Bush will today send to Congress a $2.1 trillion budget that brings back deficits and clamps down on domestic spending to finance the biggest military build-up since the Cold War.
Mr Bush is also calling for $591 billion in new tax relief over the next decade and sets the stage for an election-year battle with Democrats over proposed cuts in job training, highway construction and other domestic programmes.
Mr Bush's budget priorities have been transformed by the September attack on the United States and the recession that deepened in its aftermath.
The White House cites both developments to justify a fiscal 2003 budget that will plunge the federal government into deficits for the first time in five years and interrupt efforts to reduce the national debt.
"The budget for 2003 is much more than a tabulation of numbers. It is a plan to fight a war we did not seek, but a war we are determined to win," Mr Bush wrote in a letter to Congress that will accompany a budget sharply boosting federal spending to fund the war against terrorism
Budget documents show spending for government programmes other than automatic payments such as Social Security and Medicare would increase by 9 per cent to $746 billion next fiscal year which starts on October 1st.
Although military and homeland security spending will surge, the budget for everything else would increase by a meager 2 per cent to $355 billion.
Mr Bush is also calling on Congress to extend income tax rate cuts, marriage penalty relief, child tax credits and estate tax cuts which were part of the $1.35 trillion package that Congress passed last year. The extensions would cost $344 billion.
AFP