It has become impossible to predict the trajectory of the congressional appropriations process.
Joseph J. Schatz
These days, Vought’s aggressive use of his budget tools looms over every budget debate and document, including the one released Friday. Vought’s proposal asks Congress to approve a massive $1.5 trillion defense request as well as a $73 billion cut to domestic programs, including many that lawmakers refused to cut last year.
“Given the Administration’s focus on nondefense discretionary spending reductions, most budget analysts assume that this would be the target of rescissions if they were unsuccessful in the appropriation process,” said G. William Hoagland, a senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center who spent decades on Capitol Hill as a senior Republican budget aide. “It does change the way we look at the request.”
In another power move Friday, the Trump administration is asking Congress to ram through $350 billion in defense spending to assist Iran conflict through the party-line budget reconciliation process as an end-run on the Senate filibuster. That recommendation would upend one of the last bipartisan traditions on Capitol Hill: funding the government through the dozen annual government funding bills.
The proposal has Democrats and Washington lobbyists now closely watching the budget proposal and OMB’s current spending moves for signs of what the White House may try to muscle through, rescind or delay next — and how they should approach Appropriations Committee markups later this year in the House and Senate.
Meanwhile, less than a year after Elon Musk and DOGE rampaged through the federal bureaucracy, the government — just five months past its last major shutdown — remains in the grip of a partial closure, with a deal to fully open the Department of Homeland Security still on the table.
Congressional appropriators have sought to assert their independence in previous budget battles. Still, their power has been declining for the better part of three decades now — and the way Washington budgets seems increasingly disrupted.
“While the Administration proposes a budget, Congress holds the power of the purse,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in a statement Friday.
True, but who “disposes” is as unclear as ever.
