Spending plans include an additional $54bn for defence and military spending in 2018, with increased funding going forward compared to original projections. The budget – called A New Foundation for American Greatness – also includes provision for $2.6bn to be spent on border security, with $1.6bn going to pay for a ‘new and replacement’ border wall.

Budget cuts include at least $610bn from Medicaid and more than $192bn from food stamps over the decade. The Medicaid cuts assume that Trump’s alternative to Obama’s healthcare reforms are passed without any changes, which is viewed by many as unlikely.

In addition, the Trump budget reduces spending on a range of benefits like food stamps and income support.

The White House said its proposed tax cuts would help fuel higher growth and pay for themselves by generating an additional $2 trillion in revenues over the next ten years.

However, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan policy organisation, said the plan relied on gimmicks, unrealistic cuts and ‘rosy assumption’ of economic growth that would reach 3% annually by the end of Trump's first term.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the economy to grow at an annual pace of 1.9% over that period.

Lawrence Summers, a former economic adviser to President Obama, said the Trump administration was double-counting that money by saying it would help close budget deficits while also offsetting the revenue lost by cutting tax rates.

‘It appears to be the most egregious accounting error in a presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them,’ Summers wrote in the Washington Post.

Mick Mulvaney, who is budget office director in the Trump administration said ‘we stand by the numbers’, and said his office made other assumptions that were probably too conservative.

Referring to the 1.9% CBO projection, Mulvaney said: ‘That is a pessimistic look at what the potential for this country and for what this country’s people is.’

Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said the budget plan will boost economic growth by fostering capital investment and creating jobs for workers who gave up their job hunts during tough times.

Mulvaney also argued that Trump’s planned tax reforms would simplify the tax regime, making it more likely people would pay taxes and so increase government revenues.

‘But one of the assumptions we didn’t make was that we didn’t close any of the tax gap. For those of you who aren’t familiar with that, the tax gap is the amount of money that we should collect in taxes every single year, but don’t - for 2016 that number is $486bn. Almost enough to close the deficit that year.

‘We thought that the assumption that the tax reform would be deficit-neutral was the most reasonable of the three options that we had,’ he said.

The budget plan will have to be approved by Congress and is thought likely to attract considerable debate.