Tangle - Trump's 2027 budget proposal.

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Last week, the White House released its budget proposal for fiscal year 2027, featuring an increase of 42% in defense spending to $1.5 trillion and a 10% decrease in non-defense spending to $660 billion. Specifically, the White House requested the budget to increase the capacity of the Navy, give pay raises to troops, resupply munitions, invest in critical resources, and build a “Golden Dome” missile defense system. The administration characterized the non-defense spending it had identified to cut as part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and “woke programs” that drive government waste. Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!New interview!Before break, Managing Editor Ari Weitzman sat down with former New Jersey Governor and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman explains her philosophy toward environmental regulation, why she left the Bush administration, and what she thinks has changed under President Trump. Plus, what even is the endangerment finding? You can watch the interview here!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, the “Under the radar” story ⁠here⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: What do you think of the White House’s budget proposal? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: Will Kaback and audio edited and mixed by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. I'm your host today, senior editor, Will K back. Today's episode covers a lot of issues that we've covered quite frequently over the first year or so. of the second Trump administration and going back to the Biden administration. Things like spending cuts, deficit reduction, debt, military spending, entitlement spending, all of the above. And the reason it's all packaged together is because the focus is President Trump's fiscal year

2027 budget proposal. This is something that presidents release every year. It functions as a bit of a wish list, a bit of a PR exercise to broadcast their priorities. And of course, Congress has to take a look over all of it, make changes, and it often ends up looking a lot different than the original document. But regardless, there is a lot to glean from what Trump has put into this year's budget request. So we're going to break down all of the different categories of spending, the cuts they're recommending, the funding increases that they're asking for,

and everything else in between. Before we do, wanted to flag that we've got a new video up on our YouTube channel today, and it's a good one. Managing editor Ari Weitzman recently spoke with the former governor of New Jersey, Christine Whitman. She also served as EPA administrator. And they unpacked one of the most complex challenges in public policy today, actually something that dovetails nicely with the main story that we're covering today. And that's how to balance environmental protection with economic reality. Those two things are often presented as intention and politicians tend to haggle over one side or the other.

but Whitman talks in her interview with Ari about how climate and environment policy has evolved over time and why regulations like the endangerment finding, which we covered back in February, have become central to how the United States addresses greenhouse gas emissions. So it's a great interview and you can watch the video and listen to it on our YouTube channel. If you prefer just to listen, it's also posted as a podcast on our page. Go check it out. All right, with that, I'm going to hand it over to, Lindsay, who's handling the podcast hosting duties today, and then I will jump back in to read my take.

Lindsay, over to you. Thanks, Will. Now for today's quick hits. Number one, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, spearheaded by Pakistan. Iran and Israel also agreed to the deal, and Iran's foreign minister suggested that ships will be permitted to pass through the Strait of Hormuz during the pause, though precise details were not given. Number two, U.S. journalist Shelley Kittleson was freed roughly one week after she was taken captive in Iraq by members of an Iran-aligned militia group.

Number three, Republican Clay Fuller defeated Democrat Sean Harris, 55.9 to 44.1 percent in a runoff in the special election to fill the House seat vacated by former Representative Marjorie Taylor Green in Georgia. Separately, liberal appeals court judge Chris Taylor defeated conservative appeals court judge Marie Lazar, in Wisconsin's state Supreme Court election, giving the court a five to two liberal majority. Number four, Indianapolis City County Councilor Ron Gibson said that 13 shots were fired into his home while he and his son were inside. Neither were injured. The shooter reportedly left a note on the doorstep that read, quote, no data centers. Number five, acting attorney general Todd Blanch told reporters that he believes President Trump can and should take an active role in Justice Department investigations, while rejecting the notion that the president had, quote, weaponized the

department. In the day's other headlines, President Trump is asking for $1.5 trillion in defense spending for the upcoming financial year. That's according to details released by the White House today. The request is more than 40 percent more than last year's spending and is the largest of its kind in decades. Last week, the White House released its budget request for fiscal year 2027, featuring an increase of 42% in defense spending to $1.5 trillion, and a 10% decrease in non-defense spending to $660 billion.

Specifically, the White House requested the budget to increase the capacity of the Navy, give pay raises to troops, resupply munitions, invest in critical resources, and build a Golden Dome missile defense system. The administration characterized the non-defense spending it had identified to cut as part of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and quote, woke programs, unquote, that government waste. Every year, the president submits a budget proposal for discretionary spending Congress uses as a starting point for appropriation negotiations. After Congress receives the proposal, the House and Senate create their own budget proposals that must be negotiated and merged into finalized funding bills. By law, the president is required to submit their budget to Congress

by the first Monday in February, but no president has submitted their budget by the statutory deadline since 2015. Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security remains unfunded for the current fiscal year, and Trump's recent proposal will not affect the ongoing standoff over that current allocation. The largest line item in President Trump's budget proposal is for the Department of Defense, including 5 to 7 percent pay raises for troops, $65.8 billion for a new golden fleet of battle and non-battle force ships, and funding for the Golden Dome, which is estimated to cost $175 billion. Additionally, discretionary spending for Veterans Affairs would increase from $133 billion to $145 billion. Pell Grant funding would increase from $23 billion to $33 billion, and the Department of Energy's budget

would increase from $49 billion to $54 billion. The largest decreases are $4.6 billion, 52%, from the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, and $4.8 billion, 55% from the National Science Foundation. The budget reallocates $15.2 billion of renewable energy funding approved by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trump administration's economic assumptions project that debt held by the public would decrease from a current level of 100% of GDP to 94% in 2036. However, the CBO's assumptions project public debt to increase to 125% of GDP by 2036 under the president's plan. using a historical 1.8% GDP growth rate, opposed to the White House's 3.1% and factoring in the loss of tariff revenue deemed illegal by the Supreme Court. Disgressionary spending comprised $2.8 trillion

of the federal government's $7 trillion budget for fiscal year 2025, and the government ran a $1.2 trillion deficit in that year. The government is on track for a similar deficit this year. Democrats criticized the budget as increasing investment in the wrong areas. Representative Brandon Boyle from Pennsylvania said Donald Trump is telling the American people our country somehow can't afford child care, Medicaid, and Medicare, but is never too stretched to fund wars of choice.

President Trump defended the budget, saying that social programs should be funded at a state level. Trump said, we have to take care of one thing, military protection. We have to guard the country. We'll get into what the left and right are saying about the budget below. Then, senior editor Will Kayback gives his. take. We'll be right back after this quick break. Now, here's what the left is saying. The left broadly

decries the budget plan, criticizing the proposed hike in military spending and large cuts to domestic programs. Some argue the budget would fuel the war in Iran while hurting the average American. Others say the administration's justification for increasing defense spending is misguided. In MS Now, Bobby Cogan called the budget plan historic in one of the worst ways possible. The budget called for steep cuts to funding for education, housing, and health, funneling resources toward the military as the war in Iran reaches its fifth week. This shift would leave the portion of the budget known as non-defense discretionary, or NDD funding, which accounts for most domestic activities aside for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP at its lowest level

since Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. The proposed defense funding increases are similarly extreme. In fact, there's nothing in the budget to suggest this jump reflects actual policy. The number is $1.5 trillion, I think, because Trump picked it. It's a round number, and it's big. That said, it's easy to imagine that the president will use this new war in Iran to justify this huge increase in military funding. And if Congress acquiesced, Trump would use that funding to conduct more immoral military strikes in Iran and in the process kill more civilians.

As a percent of GDP, this would be the largest, annual increase in defense funding outside a ground war in all of U.S. history. In Jacobin, Ben Beckett wrote Trump's $1.5 trillion for war comes from Americans' pockets. When Trump's budget proposal came out on Friday, it became clear that he meant it. He wants Congress to increase the defense budget by 44% in 27. This would make just the requested increase, nearly the same size as the total military budgets of China and Russia combined. Some of this spending would simply add to the national debt, but Trump proposes to offset part of it by cutting 10% of non-defense spending from the budget.

Many of the proposed cuts would come from reducing or eliminating housing aid and health programs for marginalized groups, agricultural research, and teacher training. Trump's budget proposal won't be the final word on the budget, but there are strong reasons to believe he'll get much of what he wants, and what Trump wants is war. Most immediately, an unwinnable war on the Iranian people, with shifting rationales and increasing brutality and sadism. Trump's budget cuts are not just incidental to making war on Iran.

They're part of the same war that people in Trump's income bracket are waging on Americans and Iranians alike. Let's not be glib. Bombing hospitals and schools is worse than defunding them. But while the tactics are different, the targets are strikingly similar. In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik made the case for why Trump's 2027 budget misfires. The administration minimizes the overall. budgetary effect of its spending plans by projecting average growth in gross national product at 3% annually over the next decade. That's an ambitious goal, to say the least. Over the next 25 years,

that is, in this century, U.S. economic growth has reached or exceeded 3% in only three years, including a pandemic-era surge to 6.1% in 2021. Last year, it was only 2.1%. On the other side of the ledger, the non-defense budget would be cut by 10%. But programs the White House, House has specifically targeted for being contrary to its ideology would suffer far more devastating cuts. NASA may be enjoying a moment just now, but Trump proposes slashing the agency's budget by $5.6 billion, or 23%. It gets worse. Trump would cut NASA's science division by $34 billion, or 47%, canceling more than 40 projects, of which about 20 are currently underway. None of this means that the budget proposal isn't valuable to an extent. It's a convenient one-stop window into Trump's

personal fixations, the elimination of, quote, radical gender and racial ideologies that poison the minds of Americans, unquote, the horrors of, quote, the globalist climist agenda, unquote, the quote, invasion of violent criminals from abroad, and so on. In other words, there's nothing new under the Trumpian sun. That's it for what the left is saying. Now, here's what the right is saying. The right is split between support for the budget's proposals and concern over its effect on the national debt. Some on the right affirm the need to counter national security threats with military investment. Others say the budget plan is fiscally irresponsible. In the New York Post, Rich Lowry explored why Trump's huge $1.5 trillion defense budget is worth every penny.

We are not exactly living in a time of peace and stability. The United States is embroiled in a war in the Middle East that has rocked global energy markets, while Russia has repeatedly invaded a neighboring country to its west, and China could be on the cusp of precipitating the greatest major power conflict since World War II. This is not a time, if one ever existed, when the fate of the country depends on robust federal funding for community development block grants. There is no doubt that the scale of the Trump budget, which would be the biggest single year increase in defense spending since the Korean war, is equal to the international challenge that we face. In terms of bang for the buck,

administration has begun to fund more nimble, tech-driven defense firms, while it pushes the traditional big players like Boeing and Lockheed to become faster and more efficient. As a practical matter, the president is unlikely to get all the defense spending that he wants from Congress, which, when confronted with a choice between guns and butter, always chooses both. The Washington Examiner editorial board said Trump is right to rearm America. Now it is up to the Republican-controlled Congress to turn Trump's budget blueprint into reality, A much-needed step, since the new spending levels would bring us in line with 5% of gross domestic product, we are asking our allies in the Atlantic and Pacific to spend on defending themselves.

Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is near historic lows at 3.7%. Only President Joe Biden, who left our nation's defenses woefully unprepared to meet security threats posed by China, Russia, and Iran, spent less on defense. The threat we face from China is far more severe than the challenge posed by Russia, and we should be prepared to meet it at sea, in the air, and in space. Critically, Trump's budget makes investment in all of these areas, including a request for 123 new Navy vessels, resupplying our depleted missile stockpiles, and new capital spending on space-based missile defense sensors and interceptors.

But Republicans should not pretend that defense spending alone can secure us. Unless entitlement spending is addressed, today's necessary rearmament will arrive alongside tomorrow's avoidable debt crisis. In Cato, Dominic Lett wrote Trump's budget falls short on the spending programs driving the federal debt. The budget omits even mentioning, let alone spelling out, the needed reforms to the major entitlement programs driving the debt, such as Medicare and Social Security. For the second year in a row, the president's budget abdicates the fundamental responsibility of putting the debt on a sustainable path. With deficits at nearly $2 trillion and publicly held federal debt set to exceed the nation's entire economic output this year, Congress desperately needs fiscal responsibility.

Congress ought to reject the president's proposed spending boosts. To be fair, the budget includes a number of worthwhile program cuts and eliminations. For example, the budget proposes eliminating community development block grants, a federal subsidy program plagued by waste and pork barrel politics. The presidential budget is supposed to be the administration's opportunity to explain to the American people how it would put our budget back on track. This budget entirely fails to do so. It includes no comprehensive 10-year fiscal plan to address mandatory spending and revenue,

and thus no path to stabilizing the debt. And the budget continues the use of reconciliation to fund discretionary priorities, eroding the checks and balances that the appropriations process is supposed to provide. That's what the right and left had to say about the budget plan. Now I'm going to pass it back to Will for his take. Will, over to you. Thanks, Lindsay. All right, this is Will back to read my take.

The administration is presenting its budget as a blueprint for cutting wasteful federal programs, but the plan isn't a vision of fiscal responsibility that it claims to be. Right off the bat in Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Votz's introduction, I was struck by the dissonance between the claims that the Trump administration is in the midst of reining in, out-of-control spending, and the actual amount that they requested in the overall fiscal year 2027 budget. Now, non-defense spending is offered only as a percent, a 10 percent decrease from fiscal year 2026, which bought emphasizes. Now, defense is given as both a percent and a raw number, a 44 percent increase to $1.5 trillion. Now, that's an increase of roughly $500 billion on just defense

from last year. Meanwhile, the 10% decrease to non-defense spending would save about $73 billion. So even assuming all the cuts are made, which is highly unlikely, they are overwhelmed by this increase in defense spending, meaning overall federal spending will rise substantially under this new budget. Whether you think that heightened defense spending is justified, which I'll get to a bit later, the overall budget is a continuation of over a decade of debt increases. There's no out about that. In our 2024 review of President Biden's budget and our 2025 review of President Trump's, Isaac offered the same top line takeaway, which once again applies this year. And that was that we're in a perilous moment with our debt and deficit. And I don't see anything in this budget that's new,

innovative, or helpful in the way that we'll need to escape this peril. Focusing on the non-defense categories, the proposal advances the kind of ethos of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, shifting spending away from social programs, environmental spending, workforce programs, and foreign aid while seeking to downsize the overall federal workforce. If enacted, most agencies would lose a significant portion of their funding, and the small business administration with a 67% cut, environmental protection agency with a 52% cut, the State Department and international programs with a 30% cut, and the Department of Labor with a 26% cut, would be the biggest losers. Like most people, I'm very open to cracking down on wasteful government spending,

of which there is plenty. What stands out to me in this budget, though, is how lazily the White House identifies programs to cut, most frequently by labeling them as woke, radical, or leftist. The section on the Department of Agriculture prescribes $510 million in cuts for National Institute of Food and Agriculture Formula grants, claiming that the program had previously funded grants for, quote, clothing needs of transgender people, and quote, expanding green infrastructure as a response to environmental injustice and climate change, end quote. Now, from my own research, the trans clothing needs example appears to refer to one grant dispersed from 28,000, to 2023 to the University of Hawaii. The source I found for the expanding green infrastructure was, again, just one grant dispersed

from the 2018 to 2020 funding period. Of course, both of these funding periods overlapped with the first Trump administration, and they were initially sent out during the first Trump administration. Now, I note this not as a gotcha, but more to underscore how far the White House had to reach to find a way to sell these cuts to the president.

supporters. This tactic repeats itself again and again. The word woke appears 34 times in the budget document, DEI 26 times, and transgender 16 times. To state the obvious, the federal government doesn't have enough programs focused on DEI such that cutting all of them would improve our fiscal outlook. Our federal deficit, again, is primarily driven by four areas, health care, social security, defense, and servicing the existing debt. Only one of those four areas falls under discretionary spending, defense, and the president's budget would increase it by nearly 50%. Now, in fairness, as I noted at the beginning of this episode, these presidential budgets are essentially PR exercises, so I understand why the administration is taking this approach, because railing against perceived

progressive excess was a successful strategy in 2024. But even as a PR tactic, I think it fails. How much more is there to cut after railing against these programs for over a year in office? People want to know about the Iran War, gas prices, and broader economic uncertainty, not a handful of DEI grants from eight years ago. Any real discussion of this budget should focus instead on defense spending. Up front, I think the administration is mostly focusing on the right areas. Amid the Iran War, reduced munitions,

stockpiles loom large, as does the rising cost of damaged or destroyed aircraft, wear and tear on ships, and are elevated troop presence in the region. The budget proposal explicitly addresses these issues, highlighting shipbuilding, procuring critical munitions, aircraft development, and perhaps most importantly, new investments in drone systems as key areas of funding. On paper, investing more in these areas is prudence, and I would support temporarily increasing the defense budget to support this effort. But that comes with the major caveat of whether we know exactly how that money was going to be dispersed. And unfortunately, we don't. The budget is extremely light on details, only specifying $65.8 billion in shipbuilding funding

and a 6 to 7% pay raise for service members. But how much is going to modernizing our drone systems? versus glossy distractions like the Golden Dome, which will conservatively take years and trillions of dollars to create. The budget just doesn't say. And absent those specifics, I can't say whether $500 billion in new spending is really justified. Either way, the White House's assumptions about economic growth

don't support this level of spending. The administration projects real GDP growth will be 3.1% every year through the end of the decade, then drop only slightly to 2.9% in the first half of the 2030s. And to put it mildly, this is a significantly rosier view of the economy than other forecasters have. Annual GDP growth has hovered around 2% so far this century, and the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, estimates that it will be more like 1.8% on average for the next decade. The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, estimates it at about 2.0%. Now, the budget also assumes inflation, as measured by the GDP price index, will fall from 2.7% to 2% by next year, then remain at that level for a decade.

Comparatively, the CBO projects that inflation won't reach 2% until 2030. Now, the White House also assumes unemployment will fall to 3.7% and stay there for a decade. The CBO estimates it will remain above 4% through at least 2032. What's more, the CBO notes that lost tariff revenue negates some of the revenue that the White House was counting on to fund its proposal. All of this makes me deeply skeptical of the administration's optimistic outlook. Russell Vaught, the OMB director, argues that cutting wasteful spending, expanding domestic energy production, and revitalizing domestic industries will cumulatively put us on track for the kind of rapid growth and low inflation that the budget assumes. And again, the administration is assuming a best-case macroeconomic scenario across every major

variable simultaneously, high GDP, low unemployment, low inflation, and low interest rates. These conditions very rarely coexist, but the administration assumes that all of them will happen for at least a decade starting next year. I just don't think it's realistic. And to be fair, I don't think this budget is meaningfully worse than other recent presidential proposals, which also relied on some fantastical logic to make their numbers make sense. Instead, what I'm most distressed by is having this same conversation over and over again, year after year, with neither party demonstrating a willingness to think outside the box or

make tough decisions to address our spending dilemma. For now, two things seem clear. The Trump administration will likely end up with a lot less than it's asking for here, and Congress will still authorize an unsustainable level of spending. We've been having the same conversation for years, and sadly, I don't expect us to stop anytime soon. All right, that is it for my take. I'm going to pass the mic over to Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, who has a dissent today, and then Lindsay will take us home.

Thanks all. This is Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with a staff dissent to Will's take today. I appreciate Will's reticence to James. judge this proposed defense increase absence specifics, but I don't think we need granular details to say that this isn't a good proposal. Environmental studies has a concept called shifting baseline syndrome in which a neutral observer will compare any environmental change only to how it applies to the current situation without considering the longer historical context. We've experienced decades of neurotic levels of defense spending since 9-11, and every year since we've shifted

our baseline. We gradually increased our rate of military spending after 2001, doubling it from $300 billion that year to $600 billion in 2008. Then, during the financial crisis in 2008, we increased it further, starting five straight years of spending over 4% of our GDP on defense. We've hovered around 3% since then with years of contraction under Obama, followed by increased investments by Trump and Biden. If anything, defense spending was due for another contraction. Instead, Trump wants to increase it by 42%. Before that, Bush set the mark for the largest annual increase of our defense budget in the past 20 years at 11.8%. Again, Trump wants to increase it by 42%. Our country doesn't need to deploy its munitions in the Middle East. We don't need to continue to

in 2027, and our military doesn't need $1,500 billion to not do those things. We'll be right back after this quick break. Thanks, Will. I'm jumping back in with today's Under the Radar story. Last week, the Trump administration announced a plan restructuring of the U.S. Forest Service, including the relocation of its headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah. As part of the restructuring, 57 of the Forest Service's 77 research for facilities across 31 states will close, affecting hundreds of employees. The agency will concentrate its research division in Fort Collins, Colorado, and has plans to move researchers to positions

in nearby states. Additionally, all of its nine regional offices will close. The New York Times has a story, and we'll put the link to the story in today's show description. Next up is the third installment of our new section, A Deeper Look. After World War I, the federal government's spending power and expenditures began growing exponentially. In 1921, Congress enacted the Budget and Accounting Act, officially establishing a budget process for the executive branch by creating the Bureau for the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget. The law also required presidents to submit annual budgets to Congress, and President Warren G. Harding was the first to do so in 1923. While the 1921 law initially gave much of Congress's budgeting power to the executive branch,

controversies around impoundment under President Richard Nixon led to the passage of the impoundment control act in 1974, which restored some oversight power to the legislature. Finally, here's Today's Have a Nice Day story. The number of parasitic worms in old cans of Alaska salmon are increasing. That may actually be good news, according to University of Washington researchers. A higher number of worms indicates a strong and complex food web because the worms need multiple species to survive, meaning the ecosystem has enough

of the right creatures for reproduction. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which helped seal, sea lion, and orca populations recover, likely contributed to this shift. Chelsea Wood, an associate professor at the University of Washington, said, everyone assumes that worms in your salmon is a sign that things have gone awry. I see their presence as a signal that the fish on your plate came from a healthy ecosystem. Science Daily has the story and we'll put the link to the story in today's show description. All right, everyone, that is it for today's episode. If you would like to support our work, please go to reetangle.com, where you can sign up for

a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundle membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Will and everyone else, this is Lindsay Canuth signing off. Have a wonderful day. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman

with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Canuth, and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com.