This article is part of our President’s FY2024 Budget Request Coverage. Visit our Rolling Analysis Page for more.

President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget requests a 4.8 percent ($77.2 billion) increase in base discretionary appropriations from levels enacted in Fiscal Year 2023. If enacted this would bring the annual discretionary side of the federal government to just south of the $1.7 trillion mark — $1.695 trillion.

Departments/Agencies receiving the largest requested boost in funds (by percentage) would be:

• 19.2% – Environmental Protection Agency
• 18.6% – National Science Foundation
• 15% – Treasury
• 14.3% – U.S. Department of Agriculture
• 13.6% – Education

Those (supposedly) facing the largest cuts:

• -14.4% – Army Corps of Engineers (won’t happen)
• -8.2%   – Small Business Administration (won’t notice)
• -2.9%   – Department of Transportation (not a cut)
• -1.0%   – Homeland Security (probably not going to happen)

The budget “requests” a more than 14 percent reduction to the Army Corps of Engineers that is pure fantasy. Every presidential budget request includes “cuts” to the Corps budget. Congress does not follow through and in fact increases spending on Corps of Engineers projects year-to-year. It’s like clockwork. (More on that in a moment).

The reductions in base discretionary funds in other accounts are budgetary mirages, may not actually happen, or are small in actual dollar amount. The Department of Transportation moves from a 3 percent “cut” to a 6.7 percent increase compared to FY2023 if you exclude $2.6 billion in “one-time” funding Congress directed in addition to base appropriations. A Small Business Administration funded at $987 million, approximately $100 million less than it received in FY2023, would still receive nearly twice the amount of funding it received in FY2022. And the notion the Department of Homeland Security, which has one of its charges being border security, will see its funding reduced while “securing the border” is a politically potent cudgel, seems…unlikely.

And, while we’re at it, the funding request for the Pentagon is $842 billion – up from the enacted FY23 amount of $816 billion. That’s an increase of $26 billion or 3.2%. We don’t know what the rest of the ‘National Defense” request adds up to – just the Pentagon portion. But we wouldn’t bet the farm on Congress agreeing to this relatively modest increase. After all, last year’s request was increased by $45 billion when all was said and done by lawmakers.

We’ll have to wait for the more detailed budget justification documents released by each agency to further evaluate these proposals.