President Obama famously labeled him Sheriff Joe, the man the government had to answer to when it came to wasting taxpayers’ money. But somewhere along the way, President Biden put away his budget scalpel.

Mr. Biden submitted a spending blueprint to Congress late last month that increases spending nearly across the board and forgoes any calls to Congress to eliminate wasteful programs.

In fact, it’s the first budget in more than 15 years, dating back to the George W. Bush era, not to provide a list to Congress of suggested cuts.

Mr. Biden was wary of cuts even before the budget process started.

The lack of cuts was particularly striking compared with budgets of the last Democrat in the White House. Mr. Obama promised to wield “a scalpel” and invested serious legislative muscle into getting Congress to trim bloated programs. Mr. Biden was his right-hand man.

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog, pointed out that Mr. Biden couldn’t find any program to cut at the Agriculture Department — “not even the stuff Sec. [Tom] Vilsack and then-VP Biden thought was ripe for the picking back in the Obama Administration.”

That includes rural grant funding and the International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, which sends U.S. agriculture products to poor children in other countries.

The Obama administration, arguing that the money wasn’t being used properly, regularly called for trims to McGovern-Dole. The Trump administration called for full elimination of McGovern-Dole. It said the program had only a limited benefit to American farmers and was plagued with oversight slip-ups.

Mr. Biden’s budget doesn’t take a swing at it.

All told, Mr. Obama’s final proposed budget called for more than $100 million in budget cuts to the Agriculture Department. Mr. Trump was more ambitious. His final budget, a year ago, called for cuts totaling about half a billion dollars from the department, whose discretionary budget at the time totaled $35 billion.

Mr. Biden’s budget has no spending cuts for the department, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Overall, his budget calls for spending about $6 trillion in 2022, rising to $8.2 trillion a decade from now. Federal public debt would increase from 110% of gross domestic product this year to 114% in 2024 and 117% in 2031.

The White House budget office didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.

The Agriculture Department said the budget submission was meant to be a recovery after years of cuts that left agencies understaffed.

“This budget is about making investments in rural America to build back better in spaces like expanded broadband coverage and addressing climate change so that farmers are not constantly playing catch-up from drought or extreme weather,” a department official said.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Mr. Biden’s budget overall is heavily focused on his infrastructure and social welfare priorities, which may be one reason why it has no cuts.

He said that doesn’t mean the administration won’t propose cuts in future budgets.

“I cut the administration a break for their first year. If it’s year two and their budget is again missing this stuff, I think there’s less of an excuse for that,” he said.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculates that Mr. Biden’s blueprint, while overall boosting spending, taxes and near-term deficits, contains some $214 billion in trims to projected spending.

Most of the trims come from a pledge to limit growth in Pentagon funding, and the rest comes from what is known in Washington as “program integrity.” It’s essentially a call to weed out bogus payments in major government funding such as Medicare or unemployment.

Presidents traditionally submit bare-bones outlines a few weeks after taking office and deliver longer blueprints to Congress in April or May.

In 2009, Mr. Obama managed to produce a 131-page volume for Congress with detailed instructions for cuts. In 2017, Mr. Trump had a 171-page volume ready for Capitol Hill. Mr. Obama had better luck with his cuts than Mr. Trump.

Mr. Edwards, who serves as editor of DownsizingGovernment.org, said there is an argument to be made that the Biden budget, lacking a list of cuts, is more honest than past presidents’ submissions, which counted cuts as deficit savings even though Congress often ignored most of the suggestions.

Mr. Edwards said he still likes that presidents submit lists of cuts. Even if Congress doesn’t approve them, the proposals can spark conversations about the trajectory of spending.

Besides, he said, Mr. Biden’s budget includes its own gimmicks such as front-loading spending increases while proposing to pay for them with longer-term taxes.

“Biden’s budget has its own fakery,” Mr. Edwards said.

He said the lack of worry about spending and deficits crosses party lines and has only intensified during the pandemic. Both Republicans and Democrats, he said, seem to have concluded that trillion-dollar annual deficits won’t harm the U.S. economy.