Get ready for the sports analogies in this edition of your Weekly Wastebasket.

If you’re budget nerds like we are at Taxpayers for Common Sense, next Monday is the Olympics of the budget world, (sorry Beijing!). It’s the Super Bowl of fiscal matters, (see ‘ya later NFL!). It’s the Kentucky Derby of federal spending, (get outta here, Churchill Downs!).

Monday, for those who don’t live for such things, is the release of the Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) President’s Budget Request (PBR)! Break out the red pencils, the green eyeshades, and the multi-colored pie charts. (Hey, too bad they couldn’t have dropped the budget on Pi Day!)

At Taxpayers for Common Sense, we’ll be well caffeinated and possibly running on a sugar high from all the doughnuts we’ll be consuming. When the Office of Management Budget FY23 PBR site goes “live” we’ll dive into the details and give you what we can, as fast as we can. You can find all the best play-by-play in town right here.

What can you expect? First, we’ll have links to the major documents from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) website. So, you don’t have to suffer through long download times due to heavy traffic at OMB. Then, we’ll be writing short, pithy pieces about interesting factoids in the budget.

In the arena of national security, we’ll look at topline trends. See our charts from last year. We’re calling it now: trends will be up. We’ll look at what budget lines are trending with the fastest growth rates – Procurement? Research & Development? How about Personnel? We’ll parse accounts like we did last year on the F-35, Shipbuilding & Conversion, Space Force and more. Are there obvious increases in spending to support Ukraine against the war of Russian aggression? We’ll also look at where the money is being spent on nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy. And what’s the latest at the Department of Homeland Security?

We’re also anxious to see if President Biden will request more than $0 in farm subsidy savings this time around. In the FY22 budget, the Administration failed to find ANY proposed cuts to farm subsidies. Trust us, there’s plenty of waste to be had. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommends reforms year after year to not only save taxpayer dollars, but also to help farmers and improve resilience to climate challenges. As we wrote last year,

“Finding excess in farm subsidy programs has been so easy that every president since TCS started (1996) has found SOMETHING to eliminate or trim. Even though Presidents Obama and Trump agreed on little, they both proposed tens of billions in common sense cuts to farm subsidy and crop insurance programs.”

Just last week, farmers told us they’re not fans of farm subsidies. Let’s hope the FY23 budget hears the message.

In the recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (aka Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework or BIF), Congress ballooned the budgets for many existing agency programs for the next few years. Of course, that didn’t stop them from boosting the regular annual budgets for the same programs in the FY22 Omnibus. Let’s hope the President’s FY23 request doesn’t continue the trend of compounding spending plus-ups. You can’t dump a pile of money in someone’s lap, tell them they have to spend it in twelve months, and expect none of it to be wasted.

That’s especially true of programs with poor track records or poor prospects. For example, the BIF appropriated $1.3 billion for carbon capture pilot and demonstration programs in FY22, up from just $10 million in FY21. Congress decided that wasn’t enough and piled on an additional $50 million. The last time this was attempted, DOE spent $680 million on eight projects through the Clean Coal Power Initiative. Only one of those was ever finished, and it’s since shuttered its doors. When a player’s batting .000 in the minor leagues, you don’t give him a billion-dollar bonus and move him up to the majors. President Biden should take note.

The same phenomenon is happening with small nuclear reactor demonstration projects. They got $160 million in FY21, the BIF pumped in $1.3 billion for FY22 and FY23, and Congress heaped on $60 million more in the FY22 Omnibus. That’s entirely too much for a technology that’s unlikely to be commercially viable anytime in the next few decades. Heck, $0 is too much. For more on our concerns, check our recent report on SMRs.

We’ll also see if they come up with various programs across government for Terminations, Reductions, and Savings list that has been done by previous administrations.

What about reforms to tax expenditures and entitlements. We’ll see.

Also, what are the estimates going forward for the deficit, outyear plans – that’s all in there.

Will the budget package outline their latest version of a scaled back Build Back Better? Or have some sort of update and direction on the infrastructure spending? Be sure to bookmark the TCS landing page to find out on Monday. You can digest our pie charts better with a big cup of coffee. Let the budget games begin!