‘Paradigm shift:’ How Trump’s budget request will keep everyone guessing

In the wonky world of federal budgeting is the most tired cliche of all: The president proposes, and Congress disposes.

In other words, any White House budget request is nothing more than a political draft that’s ultimately going to be significantly altered — or torn to shreds — by lawmakers who hold the constitutional power of the purse.

But this administration’s moves to wrest spending authority away from Congress have turned that dynamic on its head. A year of funding clawbacks, shutdowns and Supreme Court challenges has changed the way many in Washington are looking at President Donald Trump’s budget plan released Friday. Ultimately, even if Congress refuses to approve Trump’s latest funding wishes, the administration may implement many of them anyway.

Plus, it’s not just Congress and the White House involved in the budget conversation right now — everyone is still waiting to see if the Supreme Court weighs in on the legality of the so-called pocket rescissions that Trump employed last year to circumvent Congress and unilaterally cancel nearly $5 billion in foreign aid spending.

“It’s hard enough to get 12 appropriations bills done and even harder when you’re not sure if the deal that you strike is even a deal,” said Joe Carlile, an associate director at OMB during the Biden administration and longtime House Appropriations aide who now runs Bluestem Consulting.

The pocket rescissions gambit refers to occasions where an administration sends Congress a list of previously-approved funding to eliminate with less than 45 days to go until the end of the current fiscal year, then “pockets” — or withholds — that funding until a new fiscal year begins, at which point it is considered expired.

Though the Supreme Court, in a preliminary decision last fall, allowed the Office of Management and Budget to proceed with canceling the foreign aid funding, justices haven’t yet weighed in on the larger pocket rescissions question. That could only empower Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, certainly the most powerful OMB director in recent memory, in his approach and the expansiveness of his mandate.

“Under President Trump’s bold leadership, every tool in the executive fiscal toolbox has been utilized to achieve real savings,” Vought wrote in an introduction to the administration’s newest fiscal framework.

“A historic paradigm shift in the budget process is occurring and is producing real results for the American public,” he added.

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.