By Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage · The Washington Post (c) 2025
The White House released a partial budget proposal Friday calling for $163 billion in cuts to federal spending in the next fiscal year, pushing reductions to health care, education and many other government programs while boosting spending on defense and homeland security.
The White House’s 2026 fiscal budget plan would codify for next year many of the spending cuts already unilaterally implemented this year by President Donald Trump or billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. The administration has struggled to convince Republicans in Congress to enshrine even a small portion of those cuts into law, and the courts have also ordered the White House to resume much of the spending, leaving the fate of the changes unclear for now.
The $163 billion in requested cuts amount to nearly 23 percent. They would come from a portion of federal outlays known as “nondefense discretionary” spending, which excludes the Pentagon as well as programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – which collectively make up the bulk of what the government spends every year. The cuts would fall on child care, education programs, climate assistance, funding for research and development and a range of other government functions.
The budget also proposes $1 trillion in defense spending, a 13 percent increase, as well as more money for charter schools and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative.It would also increase funding for immigration enforcement by $175 billion.
“The recommended funding levels result from a rigorous, line-by-line review of FY 2025 spending, which was found to be laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche nongovernmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said in a letter to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the top Republican appropriator.
Trump’s budget would bring nondefense discretionary spending to the “lowest level on record, by far,” said Bobby Kogan, an analyst at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank.
“There is no way to achieve this level of cuts without deeply harming the American people. This cut is extreme both in its own right and also extreme even by Trump’s own standards,” Kogan said. In Trump’s first term, he proposed a $54 billion cut to this category, according to Kogan. “His current request makes that extreme request seem moderate in comparison.”
Presidential budget requests are typically viewed as just that – requests for Congress to enact certain spending levels. They lay out broad priorities, which lawmakers typically rework even when the president’s party controls the House and Senate, as is currently the case.
But this year’s budget has gotten outsize attention because the Trump administration has already tried to stretch federal spending laws in novel ways. Vought has argued that the administration should have more authority to unilaterally cancel or redirect federal spending without congressional approval. Musk has also claimed to have cut more than $100 billion in federal spending from the fiscal year, which began in the fall.
The cuts have teed up a likely Supreme Court case over the president’s ability to “impound,” or unilaterally cancel, government spending, experts say. Vought has challenged a 1974 budget law as placing unconstitutional limits on the president’s spending authority.
“Until 1974, many presidents impounded – as it was called then – and the courts upheld the practice until Congress banned it,” said Richard Pierce, an administrative law professor at George Washington University. “I don’t think it will prevail, but I don’t consider it a laugher. It’s a serious case the Supreme Court will have to decide.”
The budget suggests that the White House is eyeing cuts to a large number of government programs. The administration proposed $4 billion in cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Other proposed cuts would affect child care grants, federal funding for Howard University, migrant education and aid to international development banks.
The White House budget proposal classifies a “dizzying” number of government programs as “woke” and then proposes to cut them, said Jessica Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. The phrase “DEI” appears 31 times in the document, while the word “woke” appears 12 times and the word “gender” appears 14 times, according to Riedl.
“The silliest part was how aggressively they based the cuts on which agencies are woke. The senior community service program is a hotbed of woke activity? The U.S. Geologic survey is woke? The FBI and NOAA are too woke?” Riedl said, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Proposed cuts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development include more than $26 billion in reductions for a range of rental assistance programs, in part to shift more power to states to design their own initiatives. The budget also proposed instituting a two-year cap on rental assistance for able-bodied adults – a move that is likely to garner strong pushback from housing advocates and other experts. The proposal also slashed the bipartisan Community Development Block Grant, which is used for a range of economic development work.
The White House also calls for slashing the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget from $9.1 billion to $4.2 billion – a nearly 55 percent cut. If Congress approves this request, the EPA would be forced to operate on its smallest budget since 1986, according to agency records.
Trump also proposed major changes to NASA’s ambitious Artemis moon program, as well as deep cuts to its science missions. His budget would eliminate the costly, nonreusable Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft after two more human spaceflight missions, one to fly around the moon and one for a lunar landing. Gone, too, would be Gateway, a planned space station that would orbit the moon.
The administration proposes instead using unspecified commercial spacecraft that would “support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions.” It also would add $1 billion in new funding for “Mars-focused programs.” Trump and Musk, the founder of SpaceX, have advocated for a new focus on Mars. But NASA has been developing the Artemis program since early in Trump’s first term, and any major pivot will require buy-in from Congress, which has mandated a sustained presence on the moon.
The proposal also calls for cutting $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health, or a little more than one-third of its total budget. The White House document says NIH has “broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”
The proposal would eliminate more than half the budget of the currently $9 billion National Science Foundation. One of the programs it targets is a congressionally mandated effort to diversify the scientific community and expand research in rural America and the heartland.
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Laura Meckler, Rachel Siegel, Leonard Bernstein, Maxine Joselow, Joel Achenbach and Christian Davenport contributed to this report.