Spending poised to rise under White House budget proposal

President Donald Trump's budget proposal for fiscal year 2027 — released by the White House April 3 — represents a setback for his campaign promise to cut the federal budget every year.

Trump requested more than $1.5 trillion in military spending, which, if enacted, would be the largest military budget in U.S. history. (Trump had separately promised record-breaking military spending.)

"It's simple math to see that adding roughly $500 billion for the Pentagon and cutting the rest of discretionary spending by a little more than $70 billion equals a bigger budget," said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks the federal budget.

Overall, the discretionary budget authority in the presidential budget — that is, the outlays that would need to be appropriated by Congress rather than set by existing automatic formulas without congressional action — is $288.4 billion, or 15.3% more than was enacted for fiscal year 2026, Ellis said. 

Discretionary spending includes both military and non-military spending — everything from health to homeland security to the legal system.

"This budget does not get Trump closer to cutting the federal budget," said Dominik Lett, a budget policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. 

The overall reduction in nondefense discretionary spending "is far less ambitious than what was proposed last year and is completely dwarfed by the defense increase," Lett said.

In addition, Trump's budget proposal offers no major policy overhauls for the spending that is driving the national debt higher — the automatic spending for such programs as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, Lett said.

Without overhauling mandatory programs, Lett said, "The administration does not present a credible path to lower deficits, let alone produce a balanced budget. This budget doesn't come close to his promise, and it doesn't even try."

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group that takes a hawkish stance on deficits and debt, has projected that if the president's budget is enacted as is — and taking the administration's optimistic economic assumptions at face value — the federal public debt would rise from 100% of gross domestic product in fiscal year 2025 to 103% by fiscal 2029.

Presidential budget requests are an opening proposal; they must get congressional buy-in to be enacted. So we'll continue tracking what course Congress pursues. But for now, the White House proposal goes in the opposite direction of cutting the federal budget. We rate it Stalled.