A week ago the long, winding saga of the omnibus spending bill to fund government in fiscal year (FY) 2017 came to an end.

More than seven months into the fiscal year, agencies finally know what their budget is and now they’ll spend it before the fiscal year ends September 30th. It shouldn’t have been this way. What the President signed May 5th is not much different than what the spending committees had pulled together back in December, especially if you don’t count the supplemental spending provisions which could have pushed through after the inauguration anyway.

So what did make it into the roughly 3,000 pages of legislation and explanatory materials? Some of it you probably already know, $1.163 trillion in spending, for instance. Border wall? Nope, but $1.5 billion for “enhanced border security” about a third of which is going to an element of a dated Customs and Border Protection wish list. The Department of Homeland Security has to tell lawmakers how they intend to spend the remaining billion in 45 days. All told about $100 billion of the spending exceeds the agreed upon budget caps, most of it tucked into the Overseas Contingency Operations account slush fund.

But what’s in the weeds? Some areas that were targets for cuts in the administration’s request to revise the FY17 spending bill came out relatively unscathed. The Department of Interior got a small bump, with some of the spending priorities adjusted. In what may be a precursor to FY18, the Department of Energy’s fossil energy research and development program got a bump predominantly for “transformational coal technologies.” That’s another term for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which has been the next big thing in coal for decades. All you have to know is that the bill also rescinded $240 million from failed CCS projects, so it seems clear to us, this isn’t a good investment. This is the modern day scientific equivalent of alchemy, but instead of lead into gold it is coal into clean coal.

Delving deeper into the document, we were not surprised to find a hardy perennial – a pile of cash for the Pentagon to buy a bunch of equipment from defense contractors. The problem is the Pentagon didn’t even ask for a penny to spend on any of the equipment. Yet they got more than 568,000,000,000 pennies (or $5.68 billion) for nearly 50 additional aircraft, additional weapon systems, another San Antionio class transport ship and a whole bunch of extra items for the National Guard. Good times to be a defense contractor.

We did like that the committee gave the stiff arm to dairy and cotton producers who were begging for more subsidies. They are getting a study, which Washington-speak for what you give someone when they lose. It’s kind of the congressional equivalent of a participation ribbon, bless their hearts. Separately, the appropriators told the Pentagon that they better get their act together and be able to explain how cyber security dollars are being spent and how to cross-walk that spending from year to year. Considering we’re just about to finish a database on cyber spending, we’re eager to see that as well.

But it’s time to turn the page on FY17 analysis. The Trump administration released its “skinny” (emaciated!) budget in March and we’re eagerly awaiting the full FY18 request in the coming weeks. And while the administration is calling for new spending in some areas and cuts in others, the fact of the matter is that the Budget Control Act of 2011 is still the law of the land. Not only that, but the caps for defense and non-defense discretionary spending in fiscal year 2018 are actually lower than what lawmakers agreed to when they set the fiscal year 2017 spending levels in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015. Taxpayers were promised deficit reduction. And if the administration wants to change the rules, it needs to figure out responsible offsets, not pie-in-the-sky savings that will never materialize.