– The Washington Times
President Trump and his DOGE swung for the fences last year in calling for big spending cuts, but with Congress now finished with most of the fiscal 2026 budget bills, it has become clear he barely got the ball in play.
Lawmakers took Mr. Trump’s proposals big and small — such as slashing the Education Department, eliminating the Ryan White AIDS program and nixing the Council on Homelessness — and junked them, keeping taxpayer money flowing nearly across the board.
The Washington Times sampled 30 of the programs Mr. Trump proposed slashing or eliminating outright in his 2026 budget. Only one of the 30 was eliminated. Of the remaining 29, just two were cut by more than half of their previous funding levels.
The result is a government that continued to spend largely on autopilot, despite Mr. Trump’s high hopes and tough talk.
“Congress largely rejected the discretionary spending cuts President Trump proposed in 2025,” said Dominik Lett, a budget analyst at the Cato Institute.
The bills just approved for 2026 actually increase spending from 2025, and “while some agencies saw modest trims, most funding was held flat or increased,” Mr. Lett said.
It’s a huge comedown from the heady days of a year ago, when Elon Musk helmed the Department of Government Efficiency and its employees were infiltrating agencies throughout Washington to look for the fat to cut.
Mr. Musk initially said he could slash $2 trillion from Uncle Sam’s budget, which is expected to total $7.4 trillion this year. He later downgraded his goal to $1 trillion.
Jessica Riedl, a budget expert at the Brookings Institution, said she figures DOGE’s final tally was about $20 billion.
Some of that was from small changes in public education and woke spending, but most came from cuts to international funding.
Ms. Riedl said the DOGE-inspired cuts could reach $40 billion annually, but that depends on how the federal buyouts play out. If those positions are refilled or agencies end up paying contractors to perform the same roles, then the savings would be constrained.
Those trims were all the result of Mr. Trump’s executive actions.
The bigger fight was always going to be getting Congress to approve the cuts and write them into law.
There, Mr. Trump has been nearly shut out.
In May, the White House submitted a list of about 150 areas and programs it wanted to be slashed or eliminated. They ranged from big dollars, such as cutting $17 billion from the National Institutes of Health and eliminating the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, to the tiny, such as shuttering the $17-million-a-year Denali Commission and the $1.65 million that flowed last year to the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation.
The Times selected 30 of those programs for review.
It found that Congress didn’t significantly increase spending for any of them, which could be considered a win for Mr. Trump, but it rarely embraced the extent of the trims he wanted.
In only one instance, the Navajo and Hopi relocation office, did Congress agree with Mr. Trump’s demand to cancel funding.
In an additional six cases, Congress cut more than 25% from its previous allocation but rejected the administration’s plans to shutter those programs.
The remaining 23 programs had slight cuts or held steady.
Included is the low-income heating program, for which Congress allocated $4.045 billion, roughly the same as in 2024, the last time Capitol Hill wrote specific spending bills. Mr. Trump had said the program was “unnecessary” because states have their own policies to help low-income households with energy costs.
He said the energy assistance program really benefited rich, Democratic-run states that have “anti-consumer policies that drive up home energy prices.”
Mr. Trump called for eliminating the National Endowment for Democracy, but Congress gave it another $315 million for 2026, the same amount it allocated in 2024.
The president wanted to zero out the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Congress, instead, delivered full funding of more than $200 million apiece, the same as the last time.
Mr. Trump’s best successes were in foreign aid agencies.
He called for eliminating the U.S. African Development Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Congress kept all of them alive but reduced the African Development Foundation’s budget from $45 million to $12 million, the Inter-American Foundation’s from $47 million to $29 million and USIP’s from $55 million to $20 million.
The administration last year also secured Congress’ approval of cuts to other foreign aid spending to the point that State Department spending is down 27% over the past four months from the same period a year earlier. That corresponds with the final months of the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget didn’t respond to an inquiry for this report.
The spending tussles with Congress have produced some bizarre outcomes.
Mr. Trump last year tried to shut down Voice of America, proposing that it be stripped to the bare minimum operations required by law. Then, in his 2026 budget, he called for cutting its funding from $260 million annually to just $23 million this year, enough to carry out a final shutdown.
Enter a federal judge, who last year ordered that the money keep flowing. Employees aren’t working, but they are still being paid.
Congress called for VOA to get $200 million this year, representing a reduction but envisioning a substantial organization still operating.
Both sides rushed to court anyway, claiming Congress had backed them in the shutdown fight.
“Congress has now emphatically rejected the executive branch’s proposals,” the challengers said, pointing out that Capitol Hill included some strict guardrails on how much the money could be moved around.
The administration said the cut shows “Congress itself envisions a smaller-scale agency” and that it will be up to Mr. Trump and his team to decide what that looks like.
Ms. Riedl, the Brookings budget analyst, said that with DOGE now mostly wound down, she expects the budget battles to shift from dramatic budget cuts to smaller skirmishes over spending the money Congress has allocated, either through the White House impounding funds or through more personnel reductions.
That, she said, would be tougher to track.
It also would shift the focus to courts, where judges would have to decide whether the law allows Mr. Trump’s impoundments and workforce reductions.
“The courts are going to become the place to see what’s happening in the budget,” Ms. Riedl said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
