The White House is refusing to release its federal budget proposal, an Office of Management and Budget official confirmed Thursday in a move experts have decried as “extraordinarily unusual,” and potentially illegal.
Speaking with The Washington Post, Charles Kieffer, who worked in the OMB for decades under Democrat-run administrations, said that he had never seen the office refuse to publish its budget proposal this far beyond a February deadline as mandated by a 1974 law.
“This is extraordinarily unusual,” Kieffer told The Washington Post. “I don’t remember it happening in my 46 years of watching this or in the first four years of the Trump administration.”
Russell Vought, who leads the OMB as its director, said Thursday that it “wasn’t in our interest” to release the White House’s budget proposal, stating that it would be “chaotic” and confusing given the potential for Americans to confuse the annual budget proposal with President Donald Trump’s reconciliation package known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Congress passed earlier this month, or the $9 billion in spending clawbacks, which passed out of the Senate Thursday morning.
“We’re certainly going to release a full budget eventually,” Vought said at an event Thursday morning, The Washington Post reported.
“It would confuse the entirety of the country [who] would say, ‘well, is it reconciliation, or budget? Which proposal is going in?’ It would have been very chaotic and something that wasn’t in our interest to do.”
According to the the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the president must submit a federal budget proposal to Congress each year, and by the first Monday in February, though a short delay is sometime typical in a president’s first year.
Republican lawmakers were pressing the White House to release its proposed budget as far back as early June, largely out of fear of sparking another government shutdown.
“We don’t need a government shutdown,” said Rep. Mark Alford (R-MO) in a June 4 House Appropriations Committee hearing, speaking to Vought. “That will not be good for the president. It will not be good for Congress. It will not be good for America.”