National

Budget Boosts Defense Spending, Cuts Medicare

By Don Gonyea

Published February 6, 2006 at 3:27 PM PST

This story was published more than 18 years ago.

The White House releases its budget for the 2007 fiscal year. The plan totals $2.77 trillion -- with sizeable increases in defense and homeland security spending. But it also slashes funding to more than 140 social programs, including Medicare -- and assumes some tax cuts made in 2001 and 2003 will be made permanent.

National

Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.