The President's Budget, 2025

Long ago, the United States government had a process by which the president and Congress worked together to develop a budget to determine how much money it spent, and on what. The last time that formal budget process worked was 1994, when then-President Bill Clinton signed all 13 appropriations bills before the start of the new fiscal year. Since then the United States has not had a single year in which the president proposed and Congress successfully marked up, debated, and passed a formal budget for the president's signature. For the last 30 years, the federal government has relied on continuing resolutions and gigantic, opaque omnibus packages, rather than the budget process, to keep itself going. 

Der Furor submitted his "Skinny Budget" last Friday, cutting virtually all domestic programs - programs that actually help people - by 23% of the previous level, or $163 billion. In the words of the White House press release, it "guts a weaponized deep state* while providing historic increases for defense and border security." The press release goes on to quote  OPM Director Russell Vought's justification of the budget proposal:

“For decades, the biggest complaint about the Federal Budget was wasteful spending and bloated bureaucracy**. But over the last four years, Government spending aggressively turned against the American people and trillions of our dollars were used to fund cultural Marxism, radical Green New Scams, and even our own invasion. No agency was spared in the Left’s taxpayer-funded cultural revolution. At this critical moment, we need a historic Budget—one that ends the funding of our decline, puts Americans first, and delivers unprecedented support to our military and homeland security.  The President’s Budget does all of that.”

Does this budget proposal actually put Americans first by cutting non-discretionary spending by an average of 35%? Let's see ...

Education? Cut by 15%. States and churches (speaking of indoctrination) need to take care of it, whether they can afford it or not. Der Furor is on record as loving the poorly educated, anyway.

Public Health? Cut by 26%. Why should anyone but you be responsible for your health? As Ebenezer Scrooge once remarked***, "If they would rather die they had better do it and decrease the surplus population."

Disaster Preparedness? Slashed. States need to take care of themselves, whether they can afford it or not.

Climate-Related Programs? Slashed. After all, according to OMB Director Vought, they are “antithetical to the American way of life.” I'm not quite sure how that is, but I'm sure it sounds as good to the average MAGAt as the right to bear arms.

National Park Service? Cut by 31%. Parks are located in the states, and the states should pay for them. And once we log out all those useless forests, there'll be no need for a park service, anyhow.

Foreign Aid? Cut by 84%. Better to spend that money on Americans at home ... oh, wait ... we're not going to spend that money on Americans at home, anyhow. Never mind.

National Endowment for the Arts? Eliminated. Why should we pay for cultural stuff that suckers in other countries have already paid for^†? 

Libraries? Support wiped out. Who needs all that accumulated knowledge, even though "do your own research" is a mantra of the suspicious right?

So, how are we spending all that money we're going to save by eliminating things Der Furor doesn't like? As the White House press release explains,

"Defense spending would increase by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security would increase by nearly 65 percent."

Somewhere in that defense spending is the cost of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's makeup studio in the Pentagon, while the DHS increase probably covers part of the cost of transporting and protecting Der Furor during his frequent golf outings.

Is there fraud and waste in government spending? Of course there is. Is it best addressed by eliminating inspectors general in government agencies? Hardly. Neither is it best addressed by evidence-free accusations couched in highfalutin' language that appeal to the MAGA faithful.

Do the American taxpayers save money when their state level taxes go up to compensate for services their federal taxes used to pay for? I'm reminded of the old joke about daylight savings time being the same as cutting off the bottom half of one's blanket and sewing it onto the top to make the blanket longer.

There are worthwhile discussions to be had about what the federal government should do and pay for, and what should be the responsibility of the states. Instead of having those discussions, coming to agreement on the proper division of responsibilities, and crafting federal budgets that allow states to properly plan and craft their own budgets, we have a ham-handed meat-ax approach to budgeting that serves no one except those who are more interested in cheap politics than in a functioning, well-funded government that fulfills the Constitutional aspiration to:

"... form a more perfect union, establish justice, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty ..."

We've got a long way to go, and Der Furor isn't going to get us there, at least not with our economy and our civil rights intact.

Have a good day, and let me know in your comments what you think the division of labor should be. What should the federal government do and pay for, and what should be the responsibility of the states? Why?

We'll have this discussion in an upcoming post. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

* It's worth remembering that all that "wasteful spending and bloated bureaucracy" was approved by Congress in earlier budgets.

** See this earlier post for an opinion on who's actually weaponizing the government against whom.

*** A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens.

† If you need arts and culture, go to the Louvre, the Bolshoi Ballet, the British Museum, the Egyptian Museum, and all those other useless places funded by radical lunatic losers.