You are not writing your budget. You are writing Trump's.
A President's budget is a political document that happens to contain numbers. Yours has to look like it came out of this White House — and then it has to survive the morning it goes public and the week it goes to the floor.
- To
- Senior staff, Office of Management and Budget
- From
- The Director's office
- Re
- FY 2028 President's Budget proposal
You work for the Trump administration. Russ Vought runs this office, and the FY2028 budget proposal you draft goes out under the President's name in February. Nobody here is asking what you would do.
The baseline is what it is. Deficits run $1.9 trillion this year and reach $3.1 trillion by 2036; debt held by the public goes from 101% of GDP to 120%.
What counts as a good draft: it has to read like this President's budget.
Then you'll consider the political ramifications of your choices.
- Enter your team number or name.
- Choose budget options from the categories on the left.
- Watch the running totals: savings, debt, approval, and floor support.
- Submit your budget when your team can explain it.
- Stop on the holding screen until the instructor starts the morning-after phase.
- [When instructed]: Consider the political consequences of your actions.
Turn in: one screenshot of the final receipt screen. It should show your team name, selected options, deficit reduction, public approval, and floor result.
Grading note: Passing the budget is not what determines your grade. We will grade your good-faith engagement with making a defensible budget that Trump would plausibly support.
You are drafting the FY2028 proposal. Use last year's FY2027 request as your starting point. Your team can make different choices, but your budget should still sound like it could plausibly come from this White House.
- National security was the clearest priority. The request called for $1.5 trillion in defense-related budgetary resources, including higher military pay and funding for the Golden Dome missile-defense program.
- Domestic discretionary programs faced broad cuts. The request proposed about $73 billion less for nondefense discretionary spending, roughly a 10% reduction from FY2026 levels.
- Some civilian agencies were targeted more heavily than others. State and international programs, HHS, HUD, NIH, refugee resettlement, and several energy and climate programs were proposed for reductions.
- Some areas were protected or increased. Veterans Affairs and Justice received increases in the request, so cutting them is a bigger departure from the administration's stated priorities.
- Major benefit programs were mostly left alone. The request did not propose direct Social Security or Medicare benefit cuts; touching those programs is allowed in this exercise, but it creates a political explanation problem.
- The request did not offer a revenue plan. CBO later noted that the April 2026 request included spending proposals, but no revenue proposals and no deficit or debt totals.
Bottom line: your budget has latitude. The exercise asks whether your choices fit the administration's general direction, not whether you copied its request line by line.
The budget went up on the website at midnight.
The Director wants an answer by noon.
Four things you can do. Each is a real play, each has been run, and each costs something different.
The vote is close. Work the fence.
A few members can bring small blocs with them. Read what each one needs, then write the pitch you would send before leadership locks the count.
Before the full whip count, here is who you persuaded.
The whip team has counted the four on-the-fence members you worked and the votes they bring with them.
Now count the votes.
A President's budget is a request, and a request that cannot pass is a press release. The majority holds 220 seats. You need 218.
Grading note: Passing the budget is not what determines your grade. We will grade your good-faith engagement with making a defensible budget that Trump would plausibly support.
Wait here.
Your team's budget has been submitted. Keep this screen open until the instructor starts the morning-after coverage.
The FY2026 baseline
All figures are CBO's, from The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (February 2026). Outlays were $7.4 trillion, or 23.3% of GDP. Revenues were $5.6 trillion, 17.5% of GDP. The gap is a $1.853 trillion deficit, 5.8% of GDP.
The options
Most savings options in the builder are drawn from CBO's Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034 (December 2024), using CBO's ten-year score. Where CBO published a range for different versions of an option, the slider moves between CBO's low and high estimates. Two selected discretionary options use a classroom-scaled lower bound below CBO's published full option so students can choose a partial cut. Three priority items reverse CBO reduction options to show the cost of moving in the opposite direction. Three items marked illustrative are not CBO-scored — they are plausible administration priorities with round numbers attached, and they are labeled as such wherever they appear.
Two caveats worth saying out loud in class. CBO's option scores are for a 2025–2034 window and are not additive without interaction effects — combining twenty of them does not produce exactly the sum of twenty scores. And the options volume is deliberately not a menu of recommendations; CBO takes no position on any of them.
The debt path
The projection in the scoreboard is deliberately simple: CBO's baseline debt path, less your ten-year savings phased in evenly across the window, plus an interest feedback of 15%. Real dynamic scoring is harder than that. The line is there to give a sense of scale, not to be quoted.
The administration's own request
The FY2027 primer measures the draft against the budget request the White House sent to Congress on April 3, 2026: $1.5 trillion in total defense resources, a $73 billion cut to nondefense discretionary programs, State and international programs down 30%, VA up 9%, Justice up 13%, and no Social Security or Medicare benefit proposals. CBO's later analysis emphasized one more caveat: the request contained spending proposals, but no revenue proposals and no summary calculations of deficits or federal debt.
The polling
The public-opinion figures attached to specific options are real. Spending-priority numbers are from the Economist/YouGov poll of February 6–9, 2026. The Medicaid figures are from KFF's tracking poll of February 18–25, 2025 (n = 1,322, ±3 points). Where an option carries no poll number, the blowback rating is the instructor's judgment, not survey data, and the tool says so.
- CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 (February 2026)
- CBO, Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034 (December 2024)
- CBO, An Analysis of Spending Proposals in the President's 2027 Budget (June 2026)
- Economist/YouGov, Few Americans want to increase overall government spending (February 2026)
- KFF, Large Majorities Don't Want Medicaid Cuts (February 2025)
- The Conference Board, White House Releases FY2027 Budget Request (April 2026)
- CBS News, Trump's 2027 budget asks Congress for $1.5 trillion in defense spending (April 2026)
Why we did this TAA
To familiarize you with the components and scale of the federal budget, to see where a governing coalition actually stands on spending priorities, and to feel how hard "just balance it" is. The two phases after submission add the part the spreadsheet version could never carry: a budget is a political document, and the politics arrive after you publish.
Running it in thirty minutes
- 2 min — read the Director's memo and the panel of what the President actually requested. Stress that there is no target, and that they are not writing their own budget.
- 14 min — build. Teams will start by cutting foreign aid and will discover it is a rounding error. The scoreboard gives them a live floor estimate, so they can iterate rather than guess.
- 6 min — teams land on the holding screen after submission. When you are ready, have them click Continue; the spot opens full screen with a voiceover. Let it run once without commentary, then talk over the replay.
- 6 min — the strategy choice, targeted member whip operation, and final count.
- 2 min — screenshots of the confirmation screen.
If the voiceover is missing
For the classroom voiceover, host the ElevenLabs proxy once and paste its URL into ELEVENLABS_TTS_ENDPOINT in this file. Students' browsers call that endpoint while they sit on the holding screen and receive MP3 audio; the ElevenLabs key stays on the hosted proxy, not in the HTML. Students do not need ElevenLabs accounts or local setup. Set ELEVENLABS_VOICE_ID=... on the proxy to use a saved, cloned, or library voice.
The four things the exercise makes visible
- Scale. The popular cuts are small and the big cuts are unpopular. Foreign aid polls at 49% cut / 21% increase and saves $187B over ten years. Medicaid caps save up to $893B and 17% of the public supports cutting Medicaid at all.
- Visibility. Arnold's argument, made concrete. The cuts that generate ads are the ones where a voter can see a cost and connect it back to a name. Ending a subsidy for school meals saves $14B and produces a devastating thirty seconds; modifying Medicare Advantage risk adjustment can save $1 trillion and produces nothing at all.
- Obfuscation is a strategy, not an accident. "Restructure it" is the Pierson play — cap growth instead of cutting, grandfather current beneficiaries, phase in after the election. It keeps most of the money and defuses most of the ad. Ask them whether that is good government.
- It is not their budget. A technically defensible package can still create political problems because it cuts veterans, flat-lines defense or raises a tax. Writing in someone else's voice is most of what policy staff actually do, and it is worth naming out loud.
- The money is where the ads are not. The path that actually passes runs through Medicare Advantage risk adjustment, benchmark payments and hospital payment rules — a trillion dollars of low-visibility savings that no opposition spot can hold. Teams that go straight at Medicaid lose their own swing members for a fraction of the money.
- Passage is a separate problem from arithmetic. Most first budgets die in the whip count — the instinctive one lands around 133 of 218. Three routes work, and they have been tested: the party budget (defense up, nondefense down, health payment reform, a modest Medicaid cap paired with a rural hospital fund); the technocrat's budget (a trillion out of Medicare Advantage and hospital payment rules, nothing visible at all); and governing from the middle (real revenue, Medicaid and Social Security untouched, hardliners lost, 42 crossovers gained). The coalition you build determines the tradeoffs you face.
- Restructuring is not only a poll play. Watch for the team whose Medicaid cap gets restructured to a growth cap and who thereby drops back under the rural bloc's threshold and wins 22 votes they had lost. Nobody designs that on purpose the first time.
Discussion prompts
- What was the first cut you made, and what fraction of your total savings did it turn out to be?
- Which of your choices would a challenger put in an ad, and could you have got the same money somewhere less visible?
- You chose to restructure rather than reverse. Defend that to a reporter who calls it a gimmick.
- Your budget passed with crossover votes from the other party. What did that cost the President inside his own caucus, and does the budget survive the Senate?
- Arnold says legislators respond to potential preferences, not current ones. Where in this exercise did that show up?
How this becomes an exam question
Give a scenario: an administration proposes a package with two large, low-visibility savings and one small, highly visible one. Ask which provision generates the opposition campaign and why; what Arnold predicts about how members of the majority behave; and what the administration should have done differently at the drafting stage.
What connects to Memo #2
The blowback phase is the existing Lecture 7 TAA, absorbed. Teams leave with named interest groups and named constituencies opposed to a specific cut, with evidence — which is exactly the analysis Memo #2 asks for on their own topic.