Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
Way back in the day, before things started getting complicated during the 1970s and 1980s, federal government budgeting was a simple and straightforward process. Every year, the president would release a budget that was essentially a wish list of spending and revenue levels, and then Congress would enact (and the president would sign or veto) individual appropriations bills for each fiscal year that began on October 1. Congress might have periodically changed the laws in ways that affected federal spending and revenues via authorizations, particularly with respect to taxes and to spending on so-called “mandatory programs” like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, that weren’t subject to annual appropriations. But there were no mechanisms for totally reorganizing spending and revenues to reflect some larger administration or partisan agenda. Yes, the president’s budget office (which took on its current name of the Office of Management and Budget in 1970) gradually became a clearinghouse and nerve center for policy-driven number-crunching. But the big picture wasn’t really the focus for much of anyone in Washington, which was absorbed with hundreds of little pictures and narrow bailiwicks.
Then in 1974, in reaction to various power grabs by the Nixon administration, a Democratic-controlled Congress enacted the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, and the simple process of yore started to change. This evolution has culminated in the incredibly complex and fragmented system we have today, which is giving the second Trump administration and its budget guru and OMB director Russell Vought an incredible array of opportunities to reshape the federal government profoundly via wave after wave of funding decisions. We’re seeing this play out in Washington every day.
After the 1974 changes, the annual budgeting game began to include a congressional budget resolution that set nonbinding targets for appropriators and authorizers in Congress alike (in years when the president’s party controlled Congress, the president’s budget and the congressional budget resolution tended to overlap significantly, of course). Because a key motive for the new law was reining in presidential impoundments, it provided a sanctioned way to claw back current spending, called “rescissions,” which the president could propose and Congress had 45 days to approve or ignore.
The 1974 law also included a little-noticed enforcement provision whereby Congress as a whole — through something called “reconciliation” — could force individual committees to bring their spending decisions into line with the budget resolution. This suddenly had revolutionary implications when Ronald Reagan’s OMB director David Stockman figured out he could push “reconciliation instructions” to congressional committees at the beginning rather than the end of the process, in essence creating a vehicle for massive legislative packages that could not be filibustered in the Senate. Ever since then, whenever a president had a solid governing trifecta, he’s used reconciliation to ram through important legislation (at least everything with a budget impact).
All this tedious background is essential to understand the various tools Russell Vought has for going after federal programs he and other fanatical opponents of the “deep state” (and with it, the New Deal and Great Society and Clinton/Obama legacy of federal domestic programs) would love to curtail or kill. The one new dish Vought has brought to this budget-cutting menu has been the most visible: the use of breathtakingly aggressive executive orders to initiate widespread firings of federal personnel, freezes and “pauses” in grants and other funding streams, and wholesale closures of disfavored federal programs. That’s been the basis of the Elon Musk/DOGE assault on the federal government, which is being implemented systematically by Trump agency appointees with DOGE staff and OMB looking over the shoulders every minute. Even with Musk cutting back on his own involvement in his infernal invention, its destructive work goes on, with Vought pretty clearly the overall QB of the budget-cutting effort.
Now, Congress has enacted a Trump-demanded budget resolution, though divisions in the ranks have kept it very general, with different assumptions underlying House and Senate blueprints. Congressional committees are working on putting together the budget reconciliation bill that will actually implement the congressional budget with measures that will roll out over the next ten years. They are behind schedule, and there are a lot of problems they must iron out, though it’s unlikely many Republicans will in the end vote against the final product that will be Trump’s signature initiative for this year and perhaps for his entire second term.
In the meantime, Vought is also past due in releasing the formal president’s budget for the next fiscal year, although on Friday he did put out a so-called “skinny” version of it with some level of detail on what Trump wants appropriators to whack or increase as of October 1. Said appropriators are running behind schedule, too, in seeking to determine what happens on October 1 when the most recent stopgap spending bill expires. And on top of everything else, Vought may or may not formally propose rescissions of current year spending that Congress will have 45 days to approve or (by inaction) kill (reports suggest these rescissions, if they occur, will codify some of the biggest DOGE cuts, like those aimed at USAID and public broadcasting subsidies).
All this will overlap with judicial decisions over a vast array of legal challenges to the budget cuts the administration is trying to administer via executive orders, DOGE edicts, and OMB measures. And new EOs are coming out regularly with new effects on federal programs. The madness will never end, it seems.
From the point of view of Congress, or of the poor saps trying to keep the federal government operating, this feels like an endless wave of threats and a cumulative death by a thousand cuts: first, from Trump/DOGE/OMB via executive ukase; then from the budget reconciliation process; then from rescissions or impoundments; then from appropriations, with the whole cycle beginning again at the end of the year, and with judicial interventions constantly changing the landscape in wildly unpredictable ways. It takes someone with Vought’s legendary knowledge of the budget, and his equally legendary malevolence toward the “deep state” and its employees, to keep it all straight and keep up the destructive pressure.
Needless to say, the president in whose name Vought, Musk, and federal agency heads are acting, and whose wish is a command to congressional Republicans, is largely oblivious of all these details and the arcane processes they involve. And in the end, his own whims and erratic impulses and his sheer enjoyment of messing with everyone’s minds is the X factor that makes predicting the outcome of budget cuts so hard to predict.
