Trump Sought Vast Budget Cuts. Congress Granted Few.

In a series of deals over the past three months, lawmakers rejected some of the president’s most aggressive attempts to whittle down the government.

Congress has left intact a large set of federal programs that the White House tried to slash or eliminate this fiscal year.Credit…

Shortly after returning to office, President Trump embarked on an aggressive campaign to pare back the core functions of the federal government, unveiling a budget that proposed some of the steepest spending reductions in U.S. history.

Nearly one year later, Congress has rejected much of that vision.

In a little-noticed development, lawmakers have systematically brushed off many of Mr. Trump’s most severe cuts for this fiscal year, leaving intact a vast set of federal education, health, housing and research programs that the White House had tried to slash or eliminate.

For Mr. Trump, the result is a set of annual government expenses that do not appear radically different on paper compared with what he inherited in January 2025. Overall, Congress is on track to approve more than $1.6 trillion in discretionary spending for 2026, amounting to little change from the previous fiscal year, according to a preliminary analysis of federal budget records by the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan research organization.

The Cuts Trump Did and Didn’t Get

While the White House requested sizable spending reductions for U.S. agencies, Congress in most cases enacted slight cuts or increases to the 2026 budget.

Note: Where possible, the preliminary totals are adjusted to include disaster funding, receipts, and repurposed money. H.H.S. does not include F.D.A. or Indian Health Service. U.S.D.A. does not include forest service. Interior includes the Bureau of Reclamation.

Source: Senate Appropriations Committee Democrats. The finer details are apparent in the complicated legislation that Congress enacted between November and February. Targeting primarily domestic programs, Mr. Trump had originally recommended about $163 billion in deep spending cuts. But lawmakers often did not abide, and in the end, some of the funding that the president had tried to erase — including for medical research, college aid, and benefits for poor people — instead changed only slightly, the data show.

Mr. Trump still prevailed in other ways, most notably in his efforts to scale back the size and reach of government by ousting thousands of federal workers. Still, the outcome on Capitol Hill underscores the complex and fraught politics of austerity: Where the president sees evidence of spending that is woke, weaponized or wasteful, his critics in both parties see money that is essential to their communities and the broader economy.

At times, the difficult dynamic has put the White House at odds with some congressional Republicans, many of whom are up for re-election this November. That has only reinforced Mr. Trump’s desire to circumvent lawmakers altogether, using a series of contested and potentially illegal maneuvers to revoke billions in congressionally approved spending that the president disfavors.

Kent Smetters, the faculty director for the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said that, for now, Congress had “basically rejected” everything that Mr. Trump had sought.

By law, the White House must send Congress a budget by the first Monday in February — a deadline that presidents from both parties have regularly missed without consequence. The administration is expected to release its latest blueprint for the 2027 fiscal year as soon as next month.Still, Mr. Smetters added that the result this year illustrated a well-worn truth that presidential budgets are “aspirational in nature,” and that in the fight to trim spending, there are always “strong vested interests” for keeping federal funds intact.

To come to the preliminary budget estimates, The New York Times analyzed spending across the 11 appropriations bills adopted by Congress, primarily using early data furnished by Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee and a set of outside groups, including Penn Wharton. A final, 12th bill, covering homeland security, has not yet passed.

Top Republican appropriators did not respond to requests for comment.

The analysis focused primarily on domestic spending, not defense, which Mr. Trump has increased considerably in his first year back in office. He secured some of that military funding as part of his sprawling tax legislation, which was paid for in part by cutting back benefits in programs like Medicaid and food stamps.

In effect, the changes broke with a long-running tradition in Washington to treat defense and domestic spending with parity, a development that the administration sees as one of its signature victories.

The White House nonetheless maintains that it has meaningfully changed the nation’s fiscal trajectory during Mr. Trump’s second term. The administration has already moved to shutter entire agencies and revoke billions in spending previously authorized by Congress. That includes rescinding about $14 billion that lawmakers adopted for foreign aid and public broadcasting last year.

Some of the cuts, including federal support for the organization that funds NPR, were sustained by Congress in recent months, which helped to lower the overall amount spent by the government in 2026, according to officials at the White House budget office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe their thinking.

“The appropriations bills, reconciliation, rescissions, all the different tools we are using — it’s the end of futility,” Russell T. Vought, the director of the budget office, said in a statement, referring to the legislative processes that allowed Mr. Trump to enact his tax legislation and repeal past spending.

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President Trump’s budget proposed some of the steepest spending cuts in U.S. history.

Marc Goldwein, the senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said that the president’s actions in his first year in office carried mixed budgetary implications.

On one hand, he said the Trump administration did not “get a big nominal cut in spending” in Congress for the 2026 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. But Mr. Goldwein, whose group supports deficit reduction, said the White House did manage to ward off perennial spending increases for domestic programs, which still amounted to a “big victory.”

Last spring, for example, Mr. Trump took his first steps to try to dismantle the Education Department, where he and his aides froze funds and either fired or reassigned staff members without congressional approval. Yet Democrats and Republicans adopted a funding deal in late January that provisioned $79 billion for the agency, a slight increase from 2025, the data show. They also rejected some of the president’s ideas, including his attempt to sharply reduce funding for Pell grants, which aid low-income college students.

At the White House, officials said they still believe that they can proceed with their attempts to dissolve the department and relocate its staff this year, arguing that the new funding legislation did not explicitly prevent them from doing so.

Lawmakers similarly rejected steep cuts proposed by Mr. Trump for agencies including the Departments of Commerce, Labor and Health and Human Services, which saw only slight changes to their overall, annual budgets, the records show. And they jettisoned some of Mr. Trump’s most significant attempts to whittle down antipoverty programs, particularly federal housing assistance.

The president initially proposed overhauling — and halving — the funding for a stable of benefits that includes housing vouchers, which serve about 2.4 million low-income households. But Congress did not weigh his proposed restructuring. Instead, lawmakers preserved vouchers and increased overall funding at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to about $84 billion, after accounting for fees and other receipts, according to Senate data and an analysis this month by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which advocates for the money.

James C. Capretta, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said the choices generally reflected a “disconnect” between the president’s political agenda and the typical “bipartisan process on the Hill that surrounds the appropriations process.”

The tension became apparent as Mr. Trump chased sharp reductions in federal research across the government this fiscal year. He trained his sights on the National Institutes of Health, NASA and a set of other related agencies and programs, whose research budgets he hoped to cut by about a combined $40 billion, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which supports federal science funding.

But lawmakers came to reject Mr. Trump’s science cuts in the agreements enacted through February, essentially leaving overall funding flat or facing just slight decreases, according to the association. Even for an agency like the National Science Foundation, a frequent target of Mr. Trump, the outcome was a major change: The president aimed to cut its research funds by more than half, but Congress only chose to shave off nearly 4 percent of its total budget.

Alessandra Zimmermann, a top budget analyst at the association, said the consequences would have been “staggering” if Mr. Trump had prevailed, undermining research into cancer cures and other advancements. But she said that Democrats and Republicans alike had united in public concern about the implications for their communities.

“Science is a core component of most of the American economy now,” she said.

Some Republican leaders had even engaged in rare, open criticism of the White House when it unilaterally tried to hold up billions in research grants last year, before Congress could consider such cuts. It fit a pattern of similar interventions by Mr. Trump, which prompted Congress to impose a set of new handcuffs on the White House in its recent spending deals. The restrictions aim to make it harder for the president to interrupt funds that lawmakers have appropriated.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who leads Democrats on the chamber’s Appropriations Committee, described it as an attempt to “reassert” authorities afforded to Congress by the Constitution.

“This president hasn’t followed the laws and norms of the past in any way, so my expectation is he will try to do the same,” added Ms. Murray, noting she had tried and failed to secure stricter limits on the president’s spending powers.

Many of Mr. Trump’s actions, targeting a wide array of funds into the billions of dollars, remain the subject of hundreds of unresolved lawsuits, and several recent federal investigations have found evidence of illegality. But Mr. Trump has remained undeterred, and his aides have signaled that they intend to continue trying to revoke spending it opposes, with or without Congress.

In its latest move, the administration announced this month that it would cut about $600 million in health-related grants to four Democratic-led states, continuing a pattern in which the White House has weaponized the budget chiefly against the president’s political rivals. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from proceeding.

White House officials have also telegraphed that they intend to reprise their push for steep spending reductions in the budget due this spring. In doing so, Mr. Trump has publicly promised to seek another substantial increase in military spending, with the goal of securing $1.5 trillion in the 2027 fiscal year.

Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the White House entered that new fight in a more experienced way, with “another year under its belt to broaden its analysis of the federal budget and where to cut.”

But Ms. Riedl said she did not expect the political dynamics to change considerably, setting up what may be another round of fierce bickering that could once again risk a prolonged shutdown.

“I’m still not sure they’re going to have a receptive audience on the Hill,” she said. “Members are extremely nervous about re-election, and there is not the political environment to take on major spending cuts, especially those defended with culture-war rhetoric.”

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