Biden’s FY2025 budget proposal, a breakdown
Polygraph | Newsletter n°239 | 13 March 2024
Check out my latest article in Jacobin: “Joe Biden is shipping weapons to Israel every 36 hours.” In it, I show the extent to which Israel’s military offensive depends on a torrent of US weapons. The bottom line is that if Israeli leaders simply wanted a pound of flesh for the October 7 attacks, they would have just needed their army. But because they wanted a catastrophe, they also needed Joe Biden.
Situation
Joe Biden released his fourth (and perhaps final) budget proposal this week. This one’s bigger than the last three.
Budget request for:
…FY2022: $6.0 trillion
…FY2023: $5.8 trillion
…FY2024: $6.9 trillion
…FY2025: $7.3 trillion
One reason is because Biden pitched a ten-year, $2.3 trillion social spending plan that’s about the same size as his failed Build Back Better bill ($2.2 trillion) and with similar provisions (related to child care, preschool, paid leave, affordable housing, Medicaid expansion, etc). He didn’t bother including this in his FY2023 budget request, which he proposed when Democrats still controlled the House. In the current GOP-controlled House, it’s dead on arrival.
Another reason is the automatic increases you now see in all federal budgets, like for interest payments on the national debt (now at $965 billion) and mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that have funding levels determined by eligibility rules and benefit formulas.
The discretionary budget
What’s left is the $1.6 trillion in proposed discretionary spending for FY2025, which is the money Congress controls through annual appropriation bills. Below is a breakdown by cabinet department, compared to Trump’s last budget for FY2021.
For as much as Biden repeats the “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value” line, he’s prepared to leave office with the annual discretionary budget in worse shape than when he found it. It was a dumpster fire in FY2021; it’s on track to be a significantly larger and more robust dumpster fire in FY2025.
Adjusted for inflation, seven out of 15 cabinet departments lost money: Education, State, Homeland Security, Justice, Transportation, Treasury, and Labor.
But the Pentagon is doing just fine. This chart actually undersells the growth in the Pentagon budget because it excludes the funding it eventually receives from Energy and Homeland Security appropriations. The total amount requested for “national defense” in FY2025 is $895 billion.
^Alt text for screen readers: Biden increased the annual budget, mostly for the Pentagon. This chart shows the difference between enacted funding in fiscal year 2021 (Trump’s last budget) and requested funding in fiscal year 2025 for the 15 cabinet departments. Pentagon, $146 billion; Health and Human Services, $25 billion; Veterans Affairs, $25 billion; Education, $9 billion; Housing and Urban Development, $13 billion; State and International Programs, $7 billion; Homeland Security, $8 billion; Energy, $10 billion; Justice, $4 billion; Agriculture, $5 billion; Transportation, $100 million; Interior, $3 billion; Treasury, $900 million; Labor, $1 billion; Commerce, $3 billion. Figures refer to nominal base discretionary funding for cabinet departments. Data via Office of Management and Budget. More: stephen semler dot substack dot com
-Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org). Follow me on Bluesky.
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