The Case of the Missing Federal Budget

In the flurry of federal government action since January, you may have missed one noteworthy thing that didn’t happen.

Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump 1.0 and Joe Biden had vastly different visions for the United States. But they all agreed to codify their ideas in comprehensive budget proposals that laid out revenues and outlays in great detail during their first year in office.

Bush submitted his first in April 2001. Obama produced his in May 2009. Trump 1.0 submitted an early version in March 2017, then a broader budget in May of that year. Biden’s first landed in May 2021. You can get a little budget history here.

But fiscal year 2026 dawned on Oct. 1 with just a Trump 2.0 “skinny budget” – a preliminary document with broad top lines but without program-by-program specifics of a full budget. A brief “Mid-Session Review to the 2026 Budget” added little nuance. There’s no sign of a more comprehensive assessment. (The White House did not acknowledge an email asking when the more detailed document might be landing.)

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that a budget is a statement of values, or that it turns the poetry of campaign rhetoric into the prose of governing. But it certainly is a statement of a president’s priorities for the nation as well as a detailed look at how they view federal power.

In 2017, Trump delivered a speech laying out his economic plans to a joint meeting of Congress in February. That was followed shortly by an overview and then more detailed budget documents.

So what does the lack of a spending blueprint this time around tell us?

In that sense, the second Trump presidency looks impervious to budgeting of the conventional variety.

The administration is swallowing tens of billions of dollars every month via his tariffs – a significant source of revenues that is expected to shrink the annual deficit. (Reminder: These are taxes paid by importers, not the country of origin, with some portion being passed on to consumers.)

But the on-again-off-again-on-again nature of the tariffs, as well as shifting exemptions for specific sectors or even individual companies, make it impossible to draw up a firm prediction of their revenue effects with any confidence.

It’s not just tariffs, of course, where Trump has broken with tradition and even his past decisions:

Why should you care about a document that doesn’t become law? Because every federal agency, every state and every city looks to the budget for guidance on what amount of money from Washington they can count on.

Law enforcement assistance? Disaster aid? Infrastructure spending? Federal food programs? The clues are in the budget. It’s hard to plan in the absence of information.

But perhaps the biggest unknown without a budget is the nation’s social insurance programs, where Trump again has past promises to reckon with.

Running for office in 2016, Trump broke with the GOP orthodoxy by promising not to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

Why is this relevant to the question of where his budget is?

Because detailed budgets are supposed to include 10-year projections. The trust fund from which Social Security benefits are paid is due to become insolvent in 2034. Medicare’s hospital insurance fund is expected to reach that same unhappy milestone a year earlier.

A budget might tell us – promise us, really – how he plans to address those challenges, with ramifications for tens of millions of Americans dependent on those programs.