White House comes out with sharp spending cuts in Trump’s 2026 budget plan

WASHINGTON — The White House released President Donald Trump's 2026 budget proposal Friday, hoping to slash, if not zero out, spending on many government programs. It seeks a sweeping restructuring of the nation’s domestic priorities reflective of the president’s first 100 days in office and sudden firing of federal workers.

The partial budget proposal calls for $163 billion in cuts to federal spending in the next fiscal year, pushing reductions to health care, education and many other government programs.

The budget also proposes $1 trillion in defense spending, a 13% 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.

Trump's plan aims for steep cuts to child care, disease research, renewable energy and peacekeeping abroad, many already underway through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, all while pumping up billions for the administration's mass deportations agenda.

Overall it’s a sizable reduction in domestic accounts — of nearly 23%, the White House said.

“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.”

The budget drafters echo Trump’s promises to end “woke programs,” including preschool grants to states with diversity programs. And they reflect his vow to stop the “weaponization of government” by slashing the Internal Revenue Service, even as critics accuse him of using the levers of power to punish people and institutions he disfavors.

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.

At the same time, the White House said it is relying on Congress to unleash $375 billion in new money for for the Homeland Security and Defense departments as part of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” of tax cuts and spending reductions. His goal is to repel when he calls a “foreign invasion," though migrant arrivals to the U.S. are at all-time lows.

House Speaker Mike Johnson welcomed the proposal as “a bold blueprint that reflects the values of hardworking Americans and the commitment to American strength and prosperity.”

Budgets do not become law but serve as a touchstone for the coming fiscal year debates. Often considered a statement of values, this first budget since Trump's return to the White House carries the added weight of defining the Republican president's second-term pursuits, alongside his party in Congress.

It comes as Trump has unilaterally imposed what could be hundreds of billions of dollars in tax increases in the form of tariffs, setting off a trade war that has consumers, CEOs and foreign leaders worried about a possible economic downturn.

Democrats assailed the budget as a devastating foreshadowing of Trump's vision for the country.

“President Trump has made his priorities clear as day: he wants to outright defund programs that help working Americans," said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. This, she said, “while he shovels massive tax breaks at billionaires like himself and raises taxes on middle-class Americans with his reckless tariffs.”

The White House Office of Management and Budget, headed by Vought, a chief architect of Project 2025 from the conservative Heritage Foundation, provided contours of a so-called skinny version of topline numbers only.

It covers only the federal government's discretionary spending, now about $1.83 trillion a year on military and nondefense accounts. Trump's team drops that spending by $163 billion, to $1.69 trillion, a portion of the nation's nearly $7 trillion budget that includes far more programs and services.

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.”

Federal budgets have been climbing steadily, as have annual deficits that are fast approaching $2 trillion with annual interest payments on the debt almost $1 trillion. That’s thanks mostly to the spike in emergency COVID-19 pandemic spending, changes in the tax code that reduced revenues and the climbing costs of Medicare, Medicaid and other programs, largely to cover health needs as people age. The nation’s debt load, at $36 trillion, is ballooning.

“We need a budget that tells the full story, and it should control spending, reduce borrowing, bring deficits down,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group.

Among some of the White House's proposed highlights:

The State Department and international programs would lose 84% of their money and receive $9.6 billion, reflecting deep cuts already underway, including to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The Health and Human Services Department would be cut by $33.3 billion and the Education Department’s spending would be reduced by $12 billion.

The proposal 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.

The Defense Department would get an additional $113.3 billion and Homeland Security would receive $42.3 billion more. Much of that is contingent on Congress approving Trump's big bill. That legislation drew criticism from leading defense hawks, among them the former GOP Leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

McConnell called the proposed boost in defense money in the president's budget a “gimmick."

“America cannot expect our allies to heed calls for greater annual defense spending if we are unwilling to lead by example," McConnell said in a blistering statement. "Fortunately, Presidential budget requests are just that: requests. Congress will soon have an opportunity to ensure that American power – and the credibility of our commitments – are appropriately resourced."

It's Congress, under its constitutional powers, that decides the spending plans, approves the bills that authorize federal programs and funds them through the appropriations process. Often, that system breaks down, forcing lawmakers to pass stopgap spending bills to keep the government funded and avoid federal shutdowns.

Congress is already deep into the slog of drafting of Trump’s big bill of tax breaks, spending cuts and bolstered funds for the administration’s mass deportation effort — a package that, unlike the budget plan, would carry the force of law.

Vought is also expected on Capitol Hill in the weeks ahead as the Trump administration presses its case.

Among the more skilled conservative budget hands in Washington, Vought has charted a career toward this moment. He served during the first Trump administration in the same role and, for Project 2025, wrote an extensive chapter about the remaking of the federal government.

Vought has separately been preparing a $9 billion package that would gut current 2025 funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which involves the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. Trump signed an executive order late Thursday that instructs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and federal agencies to cease funding for PBS and NPR.

Vought has said that package of so-called budget rescissions would be a first of potentially more, as the Trump administration tests the appetite in Congress for lawmakers to go on record and vote to roll back the money.

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• The Associated Press and The Washington Post contributed.