President Trump’s fiscal 2026 discretionary budget outline came out last Friday mid-day, and we didn’t have much time to go through it and then explain.

After careful thought:

The essence of the plan is not one, but two, giant switcheroos. First, while purporting to maintain the same “base” spending total in 2026 as in 2025 ($1.613 trillion), the budget shrinks the House and Senate Appropriations Committee’s spending total by a little over 10 percent ($163 billion) and instead gives that money to the authorizing committees that are currently producing the budget reconciliation bill.

While that sounds like inside baseball, the problem is that the spending in the reconciliation bill, so far, is for one-time or once-a-generation things, like buying a new air traffic control radar system to replace the one we bought 50 years ago, or buying a bunch of Coast Guard icebreakers all at once to deal with global warming’s effects on the Arctic. The whole concept of a “base” budget is regular, annual spending, so conflating base spending and once-a-generation capital spending is problematic.

The second switcheroo is that within the nominal $1.613 trillion total, the budget would cut non-defense spending by $119 billion (16.5 percent) and increase defense spending by the same amount.  As we mentioned last week, the Department of Transportation gets off easy (even before you consider the massive amount of one-time air traffic control spending in the reconciliation bill), but the cuts proposed in the budget will squeeze a lot of transportation-adjacent programs.

We finally figured out how to visualize both switcheroos at once: