Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, U.S. President Donald Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Education Secretary Linda McMahon attend an event for the Make America Healthy Again Commission report in the East Room of the White House on May 22, 2025 in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration released significantly more detail about its budget request Friday evening, giving Congress the information it needs for lawmakers to draft the annual government funding bills.

The 1,224-page document sheds light on where exactly President Donald Trump and White House budget director Russ Vought want lawmakers to cut federal spending during the upcoming fiscal year.

The Office of Management and Budget released a “skinny” version of the annual proposal in early May, requesting lawmakers cut domestic spending by $163 billion and keep funding for defense programs flat in the dozen annual appropriations bills.

While the documents in that request provided some insight into how Trump wants to reshape the size and scope of about $1.7 trillion in discretionary funding, which is spending that Congress directs, they didn’t include the level of detail that the Appropriations committees need to begin their work.

The appendix document released Friday should aid in that, though it does not represent a full budget request. That type of proposal would include the White House’s goals for mandatory programs, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which make up about two-thirds of federal spending. Such spending is required by law and is not subject to annual appropriations.

A full budget request also typically includes tax policy proposals, though with Republicans in Congress already working to enact an extension of the 2017 GOP tax law in the “big, beautiful bill,” those sections would likely be of little use to lawmakers at this point.

Work on spending bills launching

The House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to release and debate its 12 government funding bills throughout June, before voting to send those measures to the floor.

Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., will likely include funding levels and policy closely aligned with the White House request, since legislation in that chamber can pass a floor vote with a simple majority

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, has a more challenging task, since regular bills in that chamber require bipartisanship to get past the 60-vote legislative filibuster. Republicans control the Senate with 53 members.

In general, that means the Senate panel’s bills tend to look much more like the final version that becomes law than the House bills, though not always. 

Both chambers are supposed to reach a bipartisan, bicameral agreement on the dozen bills before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1, but that rarely happens.

Congress is much more likely to use a stopgap spending bill until mid-December to give members more time to negotiate funding levels and policies on thousands of government programs.

The House and Senate were unable to reach agreement for this fiscal year, and instead leaned on a series of three continuing resolutions to keep the government up and running.

Partial shutdown could loom again

Tensions over the proposed funding cuts in Trump’s first budget request of his second term could reach a boiling point if Cole, Collins, House ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Senate ranking member Patty Murray cannot broker an agreement before their deadline.

Failure to enact some sort of government funding legislation — either the dozen full-year bills, or a stopgap spending measure — would lead to a partial government shutdown. 

Murray, D-Wash., wrote in a statement released Friday evening that it was “telling that President Trump has chosen to release his budget on a Friday night with no fanfare whatsoever.”

“This is a draconian proposal to hurt working people and our economy, and it is dead on arrival in Congress as long as I have anything to say about it,” Murray wrote. “But this is just another reminder we need Republicans to join us to reject these reckless cuts, focus on the investments we actually need to make in our communities and security, and to finally force Trump to follow the law and end his devastating funding freeze.”

DeLauro wrote in a statement that the “government envisioned by President Trump only serves billionaires and the biggest corporations and would do nothing to lower the cost of living.”

“This is not a complete budget,” she wrote. “We are supposed to start putting together the funding bills for 2026 next week. If, as expected, House Republicans follow what President Trump has proposed so far, it is not a serious effort to deliver for the American people.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk listens as President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Billionaire Elon Musk said Friday he will continue to advise President Donald Trump despite stepping away from his official role as a special government employee.

During a wide-ranging Oval Office press conference, Musk — sporting a bruised right eye he blamed on a punch he invited from one of his sons, 5-year-old X — also said he expects U.S. DOGE Service will continue trying to cut at least $1 trillion in federal spending, setting the middle of next year as a target date.

“This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning,” Musk said. “My time as a special government employee necessarily had to end — it was a limited time thing, it’s 134 days I believe, which ends in a few days. So it comes with a time limit. But the DOGE team will only grow stronger over time. The DOGE influence will only grow stronger.”

Musk then compared his initiative to Buddhism, a religion practiced by hundreds of millions of people, saying DOGE jobs were “like a way of life” that he hoped would permeate throughout the federal government.

DOGE’s efforts so far have led to about $160 billion in spending cuts, Musk said. That’s a small fraction of the $6.8 trillion the federal government spent during the most recent fiscal year and short of the goal he set before joining the administration.

Musk said DOGE was “relentlessly pursuing” at least $1 trillion in spending cuts to benefit American taxpayers, shortly after pointing out a golden eagle on the ceiling of the Oval Office that Trump said used to be plaster.

“Nobody ever really saw it. They didn’t know the eagle was up there, and we highlighted it,” Trump said. “Essentially it’s a landmark, a great landmark, and that’s 24-karat gold. And everybody loved it. Now, they all see it when they come in. So it’s been good.”

Musk hailed Trump for ensuring the Oval Office “finally has the majesty that it deserves.” Neither man shared how much was spent to redesign the eagle.

Musk plans to refocus his professional efforts on his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.

New York Times story on Musk drug use

Trump said he “hopes” that Musk continues to advise him on government issues, even though he will no longer be employed by the White House.

Republican lawmakers, Trump said, are “totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent and stopping much more of the waste in the months to come.”

“We want to get our great, big, beautiful bill finished and done,” Trump said, referring to a tax and spending cuts package the House passed earlier this month. “We put some of this into the bill, but most of it’s going to come later. We’re going to have it (codified) by Congress, affirmed by Congress. In some cases, we’ll make cuts, in some cases we’ll just use it in a different layer to save the money. But it’s hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Musk declined to answer a question about a bombshell New York Times report published earlier in the day that detailed his ongoing use of drugs, including ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.

Trump desires bigger tax cuts from Senate

Trump said during the press conference he hopes the U.S. Senate amends the “big, beautiful bill” by cutting more government spending, without specifying which programs.

That package would cut about $1.5 trillion in federal funding for several programs during the next decade, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is expected to release its full analysis of the package next week, including how changes made just before the bill went to the floor will impact state budgets and people’s access to safety net programs.

Trump also called on senators to further lower taxes in the package,

“It’s an unbelievable bill…It cuts, you know, it’s a huge cutting,” Trump said. “But there’s things I’d like to see, maybe cut a little bit more. I’d like to see a bigger cut in taxes. It’s going to be the largest tax decrease or cut in the history of our country. I’d like to see it get down to an even lower number. I was shooting for a slightly lower number. I would have liked to have done that.”

Trump appeared to renew his call for Congress to completely eliminate the debt limit, even though the tax and spending cuts package would raise that ceiling by $4 trillion.

“I agree with Elizabeth Warren on that. I think we should get rid of it,” Trump said, referring to the Democratic senator from Massachusetts. “It’s too catastrophic.”