President Biden released a new campaign pledge federal budget today:
President Biden on Monday called for major new spending initiatives to lower costs for health care, child care and housing and enough new taxes on the wealthy and major corporations to pay for those proposals and also shave $3 trillion off the national debt over the next decade.
....In a $7.3 trillion budget for fiscal year 2025, Biden would have Congress offer universal prekindergarten education, provide 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, expand anti-poverty tax credits and create a new tax break for first-time home buyers.
So that's what Biden wants. By contrast, Donald Trump is proposing mass roundups of immigrants; a fight against COVID vaccines; huge new middle-class taxes in the form of tariffs; politicization of the civil service; a rollback of any and all climate regulation; a National Guard takeover of major cities; and retribution against liberals.
Take your pick.
Anyway, the federal budget continues to sort of dumbfound me. It is, as everyone has long acknowledged, dead on arrival. Literally no one on Capitol Hill cares about it or uses it as a baseline for anything. In one sense this is fine: if Congress wants to control the budget, that's their prerogative. But the president's budget is a massive, detailed undertaking that sucks up God only knows how many hours of time from every federal agency.
So why bother with this if no one pays any attention to it? Why not produce a simple, stripped down high-level budget and leave it to Congress to sweat the details? Is there any concrete benefit to the 2,000-page behemoth the White House produces every year? Or would 50 pages have the same real-world usefulness?
"a fight against COVID vaccines"
Um, no Kevin... he has pledged to deny federal funds to any school that has mandates for *any* vaccines. Make Measles Great Again1
Maybe he can start with the military?
"Why not produce a simple, stripped down high-level budget and leave it to Congress to sweat the details?" Well for one thing Republicans in the House are apparently unable to do any kind of serious legislating on their own. And if they did come up with a budget on their own it would be written to a large extent by lobbyists (this is true in many areas whichever party has control).
If the President had significant majorities in Congress his budget would really be a blueprint although special interests would still have their say. Even if the opposition controls one house the President's budget is a starting point. And of course it is a major propaganda tool. The President gets to say what he would give people and the opposition in Congress can make itself unpopular by refusing to let them have it.
This is just a strange post.
Read the US constitution in detail. The president does the budget and Congress votes yes or no on the budget.
The reason they do it is that the Budget is a political document. This is what WE want. And now the GOP has to say "We are Against this."
But if he gets covid again will he again get the treatment that required approval from NIH when it wasn't available to other covid patients? And will he no longer recommend veterinary medication or bleach?
I’m sure he is up to date on vaccine booster shots, not that he’d admit it.
By the way, this might be a good place to mention that a booster was made available to seniors at the end of February. I was unaware of it until CVS advised me of its availability. I’ll be making my appointment soon.
As an ex-prez, I believe the Defendant still gets the best medical care the taxpayer can provide. After all, he still has Secret Service protection, and it would be interesting to find out how much he's billing THEM for lodging, meals, transportation, ...
I assume they stay at Mar-a-Lago a lot so…..
I very seriously doubt whether Congress could do it without some enormous and misguided fails, every year. And the blame would fall on the agencies, who traditionally get stomped when they tell it like it is.
I can't agree that it doesn't get used as a general baseline; but yeah, it gets sliced, chopped, diced, and julienned half to death before they're done with it. Congress generally makes agency heads defend their budgets in committee hearings, which we don't hear about cause man, they are dull. That is a check & balance that wouldn't be there otherwise.
Currently budgets are formulated by agencies, based on what the agencies know they'll need to do what they've been told to do. Usually the preliminary & general 'guidance' from the WH Ofc of Mgmt & Budget gives them a reality check beforehand, as to what they can hope for. But at least the budgets are formulated by experienced managers who understand how to make things work. (Then of course Congress attacks or supports it depending on their personal, ideological, and committee priorities.)
Now imagine turning that budget formulation process over to Congressionals & staff who have misinformed fantasies about how to accomplish the jobs that the agencies do, no institutional knowledge -- and half of them have an obsessive fascination with shutting it all down anyway.
Retired from 14 years in federal admin, I'm the first to agree that the way we do it now is tedious AF, baffling to outsiders, incomprehensible to media ... but it manages to work.
Thank you!!!! You accurately portray the situation to outsiders.
It's not crazy to think that this budget could serve as a benchmark or starting point if Democrats win a trifecta in November, which is all the president's proposed budget ever could be. It may be more campaign document than fiscal plan, but either way it's not an empty exercise.
I'm old enough to remember Carter's "Zero-Based budgeting". The reality then and now is most of the budget process is like gardening: the same plants year after year, with a bif of pruning here and fertilizing there. Occasionally there's a big initiative in some field, but not very often for most agencies most of the time.
Trump now wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. But hey, only the waste, fraud, and abuse in those two programs.
Waste, fraud and abuse is the salary of every Republican in government.
Incredibly, this will endear him even more to the olds. Making dementia pay, I guess.
"mass roundups of immigrants; a fight against COVID vaccines; huge new middle-class taxes in the form of tariffs; politicization of the civil service; a rollback of any and all climate regulation; a National Guard takeover of major cities; and retribution against liberals." As the GOP 2024 Platform, I have no doubt this is a winner with about 35% of the country.
Why do they continue to do it? Because it is required by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
Sure, Donald Trump would happily just violate the law if he didn't want to do it. But it is, nevertheless, the law.
Thank you, I was just about to say this-- it's a statutory process, and that's a good short answer. CRS has a short item called "The Role of the President in Budget Development: In Brief" that was just updated a few weeks ago.
A longer answer to KD's question about the volume of information included would start by asking this: if the executive's budget request didn't specify how much should be spent where-- and by law and/or practice also include information about what *has* been spent where over several years-- do you really expect Congress to figure out on its own how much is spent in every little executive office and on every little executive program?
Of course they want the executive to do that legwork, and that's a big part of those compendious budget books. IMO it's also something the executive owes the legislature under separation of powers, a comprehensive report of how appropriations have been spent. But either way, even in Congress they have to start with something, and the historical spending record is where they start. Even *those* guys have to have a baseline of current and past practice to start from (unless they want to take the easy way out and zero things out, maybe, and even there they want to know how much *won't* be spent).
The annual presidential budget is the only unified statement and accounting of what comes in, what goes out, and where it goes. Wrap your head around that. No entity that huge can operate without something like that-- it's actually needed by both executive and legislature.
Before the 1921 act, it seems that executive departments worked up requests on their own and went one by one to Congress without so much as a hand wave at the White House on their way up to Capitol Hill. Imagine trying to run the government like that now.
(And also, so much for the originalist pedigree of that "unitary executive" BS that was dreamed up in right-wing legal opium dens. But that's for another thread.)