On Friday, the Trump administration submitted its annual budget request to Congress. The document called for dramatically reducing what the United States government does for Americans. The budget called for steep cuts to funding for education, housing and health, funneling resources toward the military as the war in Iran reaches its fifth week. This shift would leave the portion of the budget known as “nondefense discretionary,” or NDD funding, which accounts for most domestic activities aside from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and SNAP, at its lowest level since at least Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency.
These NDD programs have already suffered more than 15 years of disinvestment, including particularly sharp cuts over the last three years. In total, the president called to cut NDD funding (excluding Veterans Affairs medical care) by $83 billion below last year’s levels.
When Trump signed the “big, beautiful bill” last July, he enacted the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in history. The same law provided enormous tax cuts that disproportionately further enriched the very rich. Taken together, it instituted the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history. The new budget proposal would double down on his legacy of cutting programs that ordinary Americans, and especially those already struggling to make ends meet, rely on.
Fortunately, the proposed cuts are all but certain to be dead on arrival — not just because congressional Democrats will reject them, but because congressional Republicans can’t pass them. In 2023, House Republicans appropriators attempted to write funding bills with “only” $60 billion in cuts to nondefense programs. With Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate at the time, those bills were primarily a messaging exercise rather than a sincere attempt at legislation. And yet $60 billion proved too extreme even for the extreme House Republican conference, which pulled five of its 12 bills, abandoning the process altogether.
If House Republicans could not stomach $60 billion of cuts that had no chance of becoming law, they certainly can’t write bills calling for $83 billion in actual cuts to services on which Americans rely.
The proposed defense funding increases are similarly extreme. The budget is calling for $1.5 trillion in a $445 billion increase above this year, with $1.15 billion coming from annual appropriations and the remaining $350 billion from the budget reconciliation process. First off, the proposal is not tethered to actual policy. To be clear, the president first proposed this $1.5 trillion number nearly two months before the U.S. attacked Iran, so the administration can’t even credibly claim this is related to specific new requirements created by the war.
In fact, there’s nothing in the budget to suggest this jump reflects actual policy. The number is $1.5 trillion, I think, because Trump picked it: it’s a round number, and it’s big. That said, it is easy to imagine that the president will use this new war in Iran to justify this huge increase in military funding, and if Congress acquiesced, Trump would use that funding to conduct more immoral military strikes in Iran and in the process kill more civilians.
In fact, as a percent of GDP, this would be the largest annual increase in defense funding outside a ground war in all of U.S. history. And even during a ground war wartime, you would have to go back to the early years of the Cold War to find a one-year hike in military funding as big as what the Trump administration is proposing.
Again, these proposals are so outlandish, they will end up being ignored by Congress. In fact, the main effect of this budget will be the White House completely neutralizing its own impact on appropriations. Budgets are always partially aspirational, but every other president in my lifetime has tried to keep at least most of the discretionary part of their budget requests within reality, specifically to influence the outcome.
Trump is not doing that. Instead, the administration is delivering a message at the expense of its own influence. And that message is that the government should do less to help struggling Americans and more to conduct immoral and unnecessary wars. As the president said earlier this week, “We can’t take care of daycare … We’re fighting wars … It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”
Budgets force us to prioritize at the margins, to determine where to use our limited resources. As a result, they reflect our values. Government is supposed to invest in future wellbeing and to ameliorate current suffering. And while life is unfair, and we will never be able to fix that, the role of government is to help make life less unfair so that struggling people can get by and even have a decent chance to get ahead. The president’s budget request instead imagines an America that does less for struggling Americans.
Bobby Kogan
Bobby Kogan is the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress.