The White House late on Friday released an addendum to President Trump’s budget request for the 2026 fiscal year, adding roughly 1,200 pages of details to the “skinny” budget released in early May.
Trump’s 2026 budget calls for $163 billion in cuts to base non-defense discretionary spending, equal to about 22% of the $720 billion in such spending enacted in 2025. Spending on defense and border security in the budget request is flat, although the reconciliation bill currently under consideration in the Senate would provide a significant supplemental boost in those areas, raising spending by about $163 billion, the same amount that the budget seeks to cut elsewhere.
The new 2026 budget document fills in some details about where exactly the White House wants to see changes in spending, drilling down from the department level provided in the skinny budget into specific programs. Some of the significant fiscal changes defined in the document include cutting more than $60 billion from health, housing and community development projects, $12 billion from education programs, $5 billion from various agricultural programs and more than $2.7 billion from cancer research at the National Cancer Institute, part of an $18 billion decrease at the National Institutes of Health.
More to come: Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, noted that the White House has failed to provide all of the required documents, including tax revenue estimates. “This is not a complete budget,” she said, per The Hill. “We are supposed to start putting together the funding bills for 2026 next week. If, as expected, House Republicans follow what President Trump has proposed so far, it is not a serious effort to deliver for the American people.”
Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate’s appropriations panel, made it clear that she doesn’t need to see any more details, calling the budget request a “draconian proposal to hurt working people and our economy” that is “dead on arrival in Congress as long as I have anything to say about it.”
White House budget director Russell Vought said last week that the full details of the proposal won’t be released until Congress nails down the massive reconciliation bill, which will define tax cuts and spending adjustments that will be reflected in the final budget request.
“We’ve been in the process of getting the most important priority done, and that is, the one big, beautiful bill, the reconciliation bill,” Vought told Fox News. “It is not just a proposal. A budget is a proposal. We’re in the business of actually passing law.”
Still, having passed its version of the reconciliation bill, the House plans to turn to the 2026 funding plans this week. The appropriations committee will hold a markup session for Veterans Affairs programs and military construction projects this Thursday.
Noting that the 2026 budget is already well behind schedule, congressional reporter Jamie Dupree said it was unlikely that lawmakers will complete their work before October 1, when the new fiscal year begins. “A stopgap funding bill will almost certainly be needed by October 1,” Dupree said, adding, “A government shutdown won’t surprise me one bit.”