Budgets as Propaganda

Trump's budget proposal formalizes the paranoid style as government policy

If you are wonky enough to be reading this blog, you have probably heard the expression, “a budget is a moral document”. Budgets are not just pages of numbers, they are also statements of values. It is one of those insights, once learned, that seems indisputable and never to be forgotten. It forces us to ask “what values does this document represent?”

“A budget is a moral document” is a fine lens to consider Trump’s budget proposal to Congress, or to whatever the Republican controlled Congress will come up with, which in its broad outlines is likely to be a large wealth transfer from the more vulnerable to the more wealthy. See, for example, this estimate created by the Yale Budget Lab that considers the House Budget Resolution both from the perspective of who lose from spending cuts (mostly people with low incomes) and who wins from tax cuts (mostly people who are already wealthy).

See also, this useful graph from Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress, which shows how the Trump budget proposal dramatically cuts spending on domestic discretionary spending, a broad category that includes education, science research, environmental protection, child care, national parks, housing and regulation. It illustrates an almost halving of support from the historic benchmark, a huge walk-back from some of the key policies that support a modern society.

At the same time, Trump wants massive increases in national security functions. The proposed Defense budget, which would go above $1 trillion for the first time, would increase by more twice the total of dollars being eliminated from foreign aid and diplomacy. Homeland Security would see a 65% increase. In terms of values, we are swapping relatively small investments in soft power (research, education, diplomacy, foreign aid) to prioritize military investments, and swapping investments in human capital for building out a police state.

So, “a budget is a moral document” is a good framework. But I want to offer another way to characterize Trump’s budget proposal: A budget is a propaganda document.

I am dorky enough to actually read (ok, skim) budgets, and have never seen anything like Trump’s, which has converted the President’s budget proposal into a form of propaganda. By propaganda, I mean inflammatory and factually misleading claims are made to generate an emotional response. Agencies are portrayed as engaging in conspiracies and corrupt behavior, radicals working for unAmerican causes and foreign enemies. They therefore must be punished in the form of draconian budget cuts.

If you go to the OMB webpage to read the President’s budget proposal. This what you see.

Most of the tabs are not live, but the “fact sheets” are. “Woke” and “weaponized” are key themes in President Trump’s budget. The administration did have time to provide routine budget documents thus far, like Analytical Perspectives, but have produced fact sheets about “open borders” and the “green new scam.”

Where does pivot to propaganda comes from? Look no further than Office of Management and Budget chief, Russ Vought. When Vought was running the Center for Renewing America in between Trump’s terms in office, he released his own budget blueprint. Look familiar?

Vought pushed “woke and weaponized” before. He seems to be have been a key player in persuading Congressional members in creating a weaponization committee in the House.

Weaponization is a useful trope. It allows government officials like Vought to mainline conspiracy theories while also justifying both hypocrisy and radical actions: they feel entitled to punish their political enemies because, they claim, they themselves have been the victim. The political enemies, in this case, include core public services and anyone who benefits from them.

The emphasis on these themes is new in the President’s budget document. To confirm, I looked both a Trump’s first and last budget in his first term (the latter of which Vought also oversaw). Certainly, Trumpian themes abounded, such as concerns about American greatness, and America first. But while the content was recognizably Trumpian, it remained consistent with the tone and framing of a presidential budget proposal. It was broadly professinal. did not read like a right wing social media screed.

I could not find any mention of “woke” or “weaponized” in Trump’s last budget. In short, the tonality and themes a) does seem to be new, b) has taken a more propagandistic framing, and c) reflects tropes that Vought has aggressively promoted.

So lets look at these “fact sheets” — what is their purpose? It is to embed wild tropes into government policy. Whatever is “woke” or “weaponized” or a “scam” is inherently corrupt. On this basis, the document promotes truly extraordinary cuts. In the area of science, the National Science Foundation sees a proposed 56% cut, the National Institutes of Health more than 40%. The State Department and international programs will be cut by 84%. IRS will be cut by $2.5 billion, representing almost all of the cuts from its parent Department, Treasury.

Under the “weaponization” fact sheet, OMB says this about the Internal Revenue Service:

In addition to the IRS being used in past Democrat administrations to target conservative organizations, the IRS has built up a force of 19,000 new employees…The President’s Budget restores IRS as a neutral arbiter that will no longer use weaponized enforcement and overzealous rules against the American people. The Budget proposes to use spending reform to disempower the targeted harassment of conservatives by the IRS.

I just want to point out that this document was published on the same day that the President promised to break the law by using the IRS to remove the tax status of a private organization he is fighting with. In other words, Trump is openly doing exactly what his budget (falsely) accused others of doing and what he pledged not to do.

The “targeted harassment” of the conservatives is a perennial yet debunked right wing trope. The most visible Republican who might reasonably claim such IRS targeting in recent years is James Comey, who along with another FBI official who encountered Trump’s ire, was audited by the IRS.

The mention of 19,000 new IRS employees, ignores that 10,000 left in fiscal year 2024, that 34,000 employees have been fired or resigned under Trump, and that the administration is seeking to cut 60,000-70,000 in total. It likewise does not mention the massive budget hole that could run into the trillions due to a collapse in tax enforcement if these cuts are made permanent. The reality is that the IRS is heading towards a catastrophe in a way that will worsen the deficit. Some facts are too inconvenient to make it on the fact sheet.

Lets take USAID. Under the “wokeness” fact sheet, USAID is said to have “funneled to radical, leftist priorities, including climate change, DEI, and LGBTQ activities around the world.” Under the “weaponization” fact sheet, we are told that agency must be closed because:

It has funded non-profits linked to terrorist organizations, the notorious EcoHealth Alliance involved in creating the COVID-19 lab leak research, and censorship against so called “misinformation,” along with numerous well-documented woke, wasteful, and weaponized grants.

Terrorists! Maybe NIH has some suspicious tattoos as well!

NIH is also engaged in weaponization according to the budget, accused of pursuing shadowy “foreign interests.” It should be penalized because of it’s “inability to prove that its grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and dangerous gain-of-function research” enabled the pandemic. In Vought’s Center for Renewing America budget he made similar claims, complaining about NIH’s

increasingly weaponized posture toward the American public. Nearly three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, questions remain about the full extent of NIH’s known involvement in advancing gain-of-function research.

NSF is considered too woke. “The Budget eliminates $5.2 billion from NSF, which has funded radical DEI and climate change alarmism.” The size of the cut is almost identical to Vought’s Center for Renewing Government budget proposal: 54%. There, Vought was more straightforward in presenting NSF as a means to undermine higher education:

NSF is a major source of funding for universities, which have depleted their efficacy as research institutions by adopting radical gender and race ideology and infusing it in every aspect of their activities.

Propaganda to justify radical cuts

Both NIH and USAID are being defunded, according to the budget, because they were somehow associated with a proposed but unproven theory that COVID arose from a lab leak. Or at least, NIH cannot prove that they were not associated with it.

The purpose of the budget fact sheets is to smear federal agencies, to undermine the core work they actually do. They apply the logic of collective guilt and punishment to public services. I don’t like one aspect of an agency or program — therefore it must cease to exist. Even if you hate DEI, or are a believer in the lab leak hypothesis, it is very clear that USAID, NSF, and NIH do a lot more than DEI programs or virology research. Indeed most of what they do are not mentioned in the justifications for gutting these organizations. And Trump is cutting plenty of programs that are not deemed woke or weaponized: the National Park Service is slated for a 40% cut for example.

Certainly people can debate the lab leak hypothesis, but the idea that you would stop providing foreign aid or cut cancer research for this reason is odd. Both USAID and NIH cuts will result in a massive numbers of unnecessary deaths. An analysis in the journal Nature, estimated that 25 million people will die if the USAID money disappears. Around 7 million people died due to COVID.

The purpose of propaganda is to divorce us from reality, to push us to actions that would normally run against our interests or violate our moral code. In an administration that formed an anti-Christian bias taskforce, it is hard to think of anything less Christian than condemning millions of the most vulnerable people in the world to die. Of course, mercy and empathy are not just Christian values, but for a certain type of Christian nationalist they are values to be avoided. Propaganda makes such hypocrisies more palatable.

When countries engage in a massive dismantling of their scientific infrastructure, they cannot do it quietly. It is so obviously counterproductive that it can only occur via a broader mobilization, where higher education or experts are treated as part of an evil corrupting the nation. Let’s celebrate the end of the elite!

Trump’s budget echoes Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which used propaganda to justify an attack on higher education, fueling a lost decade for Chinese research and a much longer period of damage to state capacity and innovation. America is now pressing the self-destruct button on science just in time for China’s careful decades-long reinvestment to allow it to take the lead from us. Imagine a Sputnik moment, but where an American President leads a propaganda campaign to not compete with Russia.

There is a broader pattern here: the embrace of propaganda has become the default tone of an administration no longer hiding it’s authoritarian impulses. Government press releases sound like unhinged Truth Social posts, likely because many of those writing the press releases were social media posters. White House Cabinet meetings and press events increasingly sound like something out of North Korea.

On the day of bad economic news, Trump hosted a televised Cabinet team where officials took turns lavishing him with praise. Attorney General Bondi beat all comers, claiming that Trump had saved 258 million lives. The day before she had said it was 119 million lives. What sort of budgets can we expect from people for whom metrics are just one more tool of propaganda?

The fact sheets read more like talking points for a Fox News hit (or a Trump Cabinet meeting) than a budget document. They are core parts of the President’s very skinny budget, but are themselves incredibly short, just 1-3 pages each. They are an embarrassment to some very good employees at OMB, who genuinely try to serve every president they work for in a professional manner. They are declarations of faith, rather than the presentations of evidence. They represent perfectly an administration that has lost touch with reality, one catering only to its own information ecosystem.

The President’s budget proposal is just that: a proposal. Now Congress decides what it wants to do. The White House’s broader authoritarian project has been built on assuming Congress is not an equal partner in government, and that legislative appropriations and laws can be ignored. Some Republican members will embrace the budget fact sheets talking points. The budget gives Democrats in Congress plenty of material to work with to criticize Trump. Highlighting how the budget document itself has become divorced from reality offers one more reason to ignore it.