So far, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have released the text of four of the twelve annual appropriations bills for fiscal 2026. All four appear to approach the spending levels requested in the “skinny budget” for discretionary programs that President Trump submitted on May 2.

If this means that they are intending to hew to the overall spending total requested by the Trump Administration, that spells trouble for the Transportation-HUD bill and other domestic interests.

The story so far

The House Appropriations Committee has adopted subcommittee spending totals for the first four bills. Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) says he has to wait on the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the full discretionary request before assigning final numbers (CBO’s take on the amount of HUD offsetting receipts is particularly important). But the fact that the defense bill, which is half of the entire total, is in the first four shows us that the House R’s are adhering to the Trump request on at least that bill.

What that means

President Trump’s overall discretionary total for the year is $1.450 trillion (as scored by his own Office of Management and Budget), which is a $150 billion cut from the $1.600 trillion (as scored by CBO) enacted in the previous year.

If the appropriators in the House really are shooting for the overall total in the Trump budget, it’s an easy task to subtract those four bills from the total and get a good approximation of how much is left.

If House appropriators stick with a total spending number of around the Trump request of $1.45 billion (give or take some scorekeeping changes from CBO), they will have to cut the eight remaining spending bills, including Transportation-HUD, in the aggregate, by about 30 percent from their enacted 2025 levels.

The normal method used is to squeeze capital programs as much as possible so as to reduce the pressure on operational accounts that pay federal employee salaries and benefits.

This is the situation that the Transportation-HUD bill faces in the Administration’s budget. Certainly workable, even generous, on the DOT side (aside from the contract authority rescission killing the Charging and Refueling Corridor program and a separate rescission proposal, not shown because it won’t score, killing the NEVI electric vehicle charging program), but a killer at HUD.

Putting the request for the Transportation-HUD bill in perspective, with the FY 2025 scoring changed to put the $8 billion “emergency” money for housing renewals back into the total: