Yuval Levin looks beyond rhetoric to examine facts about federal government spending.
The most striking thing about general spending patterns in the second Trump administration so far is how much they resemble Biden-era patterns. Gross spending levels are a little higher this year than last, mostly because of increased entitlement spending and higher interest payments. But the difference is modest, and if you were to judge the state of federal policy by looking at the overall trend of federal spending, you would have to say that little has changed since Trump returned to the White House in January.
There is no hint in these figures that DOGE ever existed, and no evidence of mass disruption or substantial redirection.
Going through the budget department by department in these Treasury figures mostly offers the same impression. The budget of the most expensive cabinet agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, has been just slightly higher this year than last, mostly because of modestly elevated Medicare spending, but has closely tracked Biden’s final year in office. That would also be the case if we focused only on discretionary HHS spending in both years.
The Pentagon budget, which is the government’s second highest, is also only slightly higher, as additional OBBBA-provided spending has not really begun to flow yet.
That’s not to say that no changes are apparent anywhere. The Department of Education’s budget, for instance, does look somewhat different than it did in Joe Biden’s last year in office.
A small portion of this divergence reflects changes in staffing levels, as some employees have been laid off, but most of it at this point appears to be a function of sharply lower disbursements from the Education Stabilization Fund. …
… But these figures do not at this point reflect the more ambitious restructuring of the Department of Education that the administration is pursuing.
