Trump Budget Fails to Offer Solutions, Raises Risk of Hasty, Harmful Cuts

President Trump’s 2027 budget, released today, isn’t a serious plan to address real issues facing families and the nation. It isn’t worthy of the American people. It’s just one more example of how the Trump Administration has turned its back on the millions of families struggling to afford the basics.

The budget lacks any commitment, let alone policy ideas, to address families’ struggles to afford housing, health care, food, utilities, and child care. This is stunning. The President has presided over a massive increase in health care premiums, raising costs for some 20 million people in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and sharp increases in energy costs. The public is clear that it is deeply concerned about affordability. Yet the budget either proposes nothing to address core affordability issues or makes them worse.

The budget makes the President’s priorities clear. It calls for massive increases in defense funding and spending tens of billions from last year’s megabill (H.R. 1) on the Administration’s immigration detention and deportation dragnet. It makes cuts in a range of areas that matter to families, including education; healthy fruits and vegetables for low-income pregnant and postpartum parents, toddlers, and preschoolers; food assistance for low-income seniors; and utility assistance. It also cuts the number of households who get help paying the rent. And it continues to adhere to the view that we should cede control of energy transition innovation to our international competitors even as energy demand and costs rise. All told, it cuts roughly $100 billion from non-defense discretionary spending after adjusting for inflation.

The Administration takes a head-in-the-sand approach to other serious challenges facing the nation. It lays out no serious plans to address our fiscal challenges, which H.R. 1 worsened by $3.4 trillion over a decade, or the possibility that AI will result in job dislocations that our current policies are insufficient to help workers and their families weather.

The budget also uses various implausible assumptions to make its numbers look better than they are likely to be. It shows that tariffs will bring in 40 percent more than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected before the Supreme Court decision striking down a large share of the tariffs, and that economic growth next year will be more than 50 percent higher than CBO’s projection or the median projection by Federal Reserve Board members and presidents last December. These higher growth assumptions drive projections of revenues up and deficits down.

The budget also should be viewed against the possibility that Congress will pursue partisan fast-track “reconciliation” legislation again this year.

The President’s budget calls on Congress to use the reconciliation process to enact a large part of its massive increase in defense funding. This is the same process that the President and Republican congressional leaders have said they want to use to fund agency operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the same process they used last year to enact tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy paid for in part by slashing health coverage and food assistance. With the President and congressional leaders endorsing another reconciliation bill and pushing for rapid action, there’s a risk that Congress and the Administration will expand the bill to enact further harmful policies through rushed legislation.

The President’s budget doesn’t spell out offsets for the defense increases it wants passed in a reconciliation bill, but last year the Administration’s budget also did not spell out the enormous cuts to SNAP and Medicaid that the President later encouraged Congress to enact. Policymakers should commit now not to adopt any further policies that take away health care, food assistance, or other assistance from people who need it — and to reverse the damage they’ve already done.

The President’s agenda does not meet this moment. The nation faces enormous opportunities and challenges. Too many people struggle to afford the basics. Inequality is glaringly large. AI holds both promise and the possibility of significant hardship for some workers and their families. We need a clean energy transition to address demand and cost. And we need strategic and humane immigration policies that recognize how immigrants benefit our communities, fiscal outlook, and our economy.

At the same time, massive tax cuts over the last 25 years have robbed us of the resources needed to tackle our problems and embrace the future with creativity and boldness.

Sadly, this budget provides no roadmap for seizing opportunities or addressing our challenges. It is fundamentally unserious.

Policymakers must reject it and instead pursue a course correction that fulfills the so-far empty promises the President has made to help address the real-world challenges families face today affording the basics and that prepares the country for both the promise and risks the future may hold.