President Donald Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year would slash approximately $163 billion from key federal programs in education, health, housing and other sectors while boosting spending on immigration enforcement and defense programs in an effort to gut wide swaths of government that drew the ire of conservative activists during his four years out of government.
The blueprint for the president’s budget, which was officially transmitted to Congress on Friday, would cut discretionary, non-defense spending — a category that does not include earned benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — by 22.6 percent next year by reducing or eliminating many programs while giving defense spending a 13 percent boost.
If enacted, it would represent a massive contraction in the size and scope of government with corresponding spending reductions at a time when economic experts and business leaders fear that Trump’s erratic trade and tariff policies are pushing the American economy into a self-inflicted recession. Trump’s plan would also serve to repudiate and punish agencies for work performed during the Biden administration on matters that are now disfavored by the incumbent Republican Party under Trump.
The plan puts further pressure on Congress — including the powerful House and Senate appropriations committees — to write budgeting legislation that would legitimize the unlawful cuts Trump and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency have been making by closing wholesale multiple federal agencies, even absent authorization from the legislative branch.
During a press call with reporters on Friday, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought said the administration took pains to protect certain agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, plus “numerous other priorities that the President is intent on spending on.”
But other parts of the government could see as much as 35 percent slashed from the budget on average, Vought said.
He explained that the massive reductions in spending were part of “a pretty historic effort to deal with the bureaucracy … that we believe has grown up over many years, to be entrenched against the interests of the American people.”
Vought credited the Musk-led efficiency initiative with helping to “shine a light” on “the degree to which it is woke and it is wasteful, and … dividing us on the on the on the basis of race and identity as a country.”
Those parts of the government, he added, had been “weaponized against us” and were being cut to the bone so as to prevent them from being used in any similar way by future administrations with “elimination of wokeism and CRT and programs that were dividing us on the basis of race and identity.”
Vought also said the budget includes “numerous efforts throughout to deal with those particular portions of the bureaucracy that were weaponized against the American people,” including by taking a meat ax to wide swaths of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and portions of the Department of Justice and even some Homeland Security and State Department programs.
Of the proposed $175 billion that Trump’s budget plan would increase Homeland Security spending and the $1.01 trillion for the Defense Department, at least $325 billion of that is expected to be included in the partisan spending packageTrump wants passed as “one big, beautiful bill” including tax cuts and border security spending.
That’s because it is expected to be taken up under a procedure known as budget reconciliation that allows the Senate to pass tax and spending bills under certain conditions while bypassing the regular chamber rules that allow Democrats to block legislation by requiring 60 votes to end debate. Instead, only a simple majority of 51 votes is required.
Because the reconciliation procedures circumvent the upper chamber’s infamous filibuster, Trump could get his border spending through without a single Democratic vote.
Vought told reporters the reconciliation package is important for enacting Trump’s border policies because it will prevent the possibility of horse-trading that has let Democrats in the past extract so-called “parity” concessions in which defense and non-defense spending increases are linked.
“That is why we have $150 billion a of mandatory spending that’s working its way through the House and the Senate right now, $119 billion of that is dedicated and devoted and reflected in the House bill already for Department of Defense and our national defense needs. So that will, in addition to the current discretionary levels that the Defense Department is operating, will get us to a trillion dollar level, and we believe it is more durable of a strategy and a paradigm shift than continually to expect that we’re going to just send this up and not have the appropriations bogged down into either an omnibus bill that becomes something that no one wants to vote for, let alone sign and or devolve into a CR which is not good for the Department of Defense either,” he said.
Vought added that the DHS spending would follow the same pattern because the administration is “trying to spend and buy out all of our increases into a the mandatory side via reconciliation.”
“We think it is a historic commitment to both defense and homeland security, but also a paradigm shift, not unlike what this President is doing on a host of fronts, to do it different, do it better and be more successful at it, and hopefully both save the country from a the fiscal calamity that the Biden administration gave us, and begin to really have a historic effort to cut non defense spending, but to do it in a context where we can also have historic levels of necessary security funding,” he said.