Domestic Discretionary Programs Have Been Dramatically Cut in Recent Years

Domestic discretionary funding is a core part of the federal budget that, among other functions, makes most of the country’s long-term federal domestic investments, pays for many critical government services, and funds some of the country’s crucial anti-poverty work. (see “What activities are funded in this part of the budget?” below for a more detailed explanation) Congress renegotiates this part of the federal budget, also known as nonsecurity discretionary (NSD) funding, on an annual basis, but the programs and activities that it funds have been dramatically cut over the past few years.

According to new analysis from the Center for American Progress, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, nonsecurity discretionary funding has been cut roughly 10 percent since 2023—a cut approximately two-thirds as large as the historic Medicaid cuts enacted in the Big Beautiful Bill, which exist in a different part of the budget.¹ The steep cuts over the past few years have caused total NSD funding to drop below 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a low level not seen since the Eisenhower administration.² These cuts shortchange the nation’s future by forgoing vital investments in the American people. Appropriators would need to provide an additional $87 billion for NSD in fiscal year 2027, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, to restore NSD funding to 2023 levels. Congress should work to undo the atrophy of the past few years.

Funding for federal programs is split into two categories: discretionary and mandatory.³ Mandatory programs are mostly either automatic or renewed perennially, almost always without annual renegotiation, as the funding for these programs is determined by the laws governing them.⁴ Discretionary funding levels, however, are set by Congress each year through the annual appropriations process. The discretionary portion of the budget makes up roughly 27 percent of total program funding. In other words, each year Congress actively renegotiates roughly 27 percent of the budget. The discretionary activities that serve domestic needs not related to national security account for roughly 9 percent of total program funding. Despite being just 9 percent of the total program budget, NSD programs are crucial to helping Americans succeed and the country thrive.

Following the 2010 midterm elections, when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives,⁵ a long string of fights and near government shutdowns resulted in significant cuts to NSD programs in the early part of 2011.⁶ Later that year, congressional Republicans threatened to force the federal government to default on its debt unless the Obama administration and congressional Democrats agreed to significant additional program cuts.⁷ This culminated in the Budget Control Act of 2011, which created 10 years of statutory budget caps for discretionary funding and created a select committee that was instructed to find an additional $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.⁸ The committee failed to reach any agreement, however, which automatically triggered additional discretionary budget cuts (as well as some mandatory budget cuts).⁹ This led to a decade of disinvestment, leaving NSD funding significantly lower despite five budget deals across nine years that partially undid these cuts.¹⁰

Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration sought to undo these cuts starting in fiscal year 2022, after the budget caps ended.¹¹ In President Joe Biden’s first full fiscal year in office, NSD funding increased 9.1 percent for the year (fiscal year 2022) and increased an additional 7.8 percent above that the following year (fiscal year 2023). While elected Democrats’ aim at the time was for these funding deals to make a significant dent toward undoing those deep cuts to domestic discretionary programs, the unexpected inflation that swept the world following the COVID-19 pandemic ate away most of the increases.¹² Fiscal year 2023 funding ended up being only 1.9 percent—$13 billion—above fiscal year 2021 levels after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

After retaking control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections,¹³ congressional Republican leadership, as it had 12 years earlier, threatened to force the federal government to default on its debt unless the Biden administration and congressional Democrats agreed to large funding cuts.¹⁴ This led to the enactment of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which created budget caps for two years that roughly froze nondefense funding levels before adjusting for inflation, thus locking in meaningful cuts after adjusting for inflation and population growth.¹⁵ The Trump administration and congressional Republicans ignored the budget deal for 2025 and cut further below the agreement.¹⁶ NSD levels in 2026 fared better but stayed roughly flat after accounting for inflation and population growth.

With fiscal year 2026 NSD funding cut 0.1 percent in nominal dollars from its 2023 level, actual services, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, fell 10.3 percent since 2023 (8.6 percent when adjusting only for inflation). These cuts were roughly two-thirds as steep as the historic Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) cuts—about 16 percent by the end of the budget window—in the Big Beautiful Bill, measured by percentage cut. And if Congress were to freeze nonsecurity discretionary funding for fiscal year 2027, the cuts would grow to 13.0 percent. For perspective, fiscal year 2013—the year that saw the deepest cuts under the Budget Control Act—left NSD with a 17.9 percent cut relative to 2010.

Even just a roughly 16 percent cut to Medicaid and CHIP is disastrous. The Medicaid and CHIP provisions are expected to cause around 7.5 million people to lose their health insurance. Clinics have already begun to close and hospitals have already begun cutting services across the country, with some explicitly citing the Big Beautiful Bill’s Medicaid and CHIP cuts as a reason.¹⁷

A 10.3 percent cut to nonsecurity discretionary programs has been similarly disastrous. For instance, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, in the past three years federal education funding as a whole has been cut 10 percent, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has been cut 8 percent, and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, which helps states ensure water is safe to drink, has been cut 3 percent.¹⁸

The opportunity cost of lost higher funding has similarly been deeply harmful. If all NSD programs in 2026 had received 11.5 percent higher funding than they actually received (the inverse of a 10.3 percent cut), that would mean 800,000 more people could have received housing support under Section 8.¹⁹ Similarly, there could have been 8,100 more National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants funding crucial biomedical research (of the typical grant size) and 2,700 more Social Security caseworkers and customer service personnel.²⁰

Not only has Congress failed to undo the severe NSD cuts that began in 2011, but it also has now doubled down on them with another set of deep cuts. In total, discretionary nonsecurity programs are 19.6 percent below their 2010 levels, after adjusting for inflation and population growth (10.7 percent when adjusting only for inflation). In other words, the real services this portion of the budget delivers have been cut by one-fifth, steeper than the Medicaid cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill.

If all domestic discretionary programs in 2026 received 24.4 percent higher funding than they actually received in 2026 (the inverse of a 19.6 percent cut), that would mean 1.7 million more people could receive housing support under Section 8, and there could be 17,150 more NIH grants (of the typical grant size) and 5,750 more Social Security caseworkers and customer service personnel.²¹

Taken as a whole, the cuts of the past 16 years are a stark deviation in the modern era of discretionary budgeting: The funding for domestic discretionary services is now significantly below the average over the pre-2011 average. (see Figure 5)²² As a percentage of GDP, nonsecurity discretionary now sits below 2 percent, levels not seen since the Eisenhower administration.²³

This report has so far focused on how much money appropriators have provided, with a handful of tweaks to ensure conceptual consistency over time and an eye at showing how much funding various activities have received. (please see the Methodology section at the end of the report)

This section focuses on one-time laws that provide funding for many of the same activities but that the authors excluded from the top-line analysis because, while the laws provided funding for activities that have traditionally been funded through discretionary appropriations (and some of them had funding that was technically coded as discretionary), they are nonetheless meaningfully different from annual appropriations. This report has excluded one-time emergency funding and for similar reasons it has excluded the following investments that likewise provided one-time, temporary funding.

In 2021, President Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which provided higher levels of investment funding for five years, primarily for transportation, though also for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, and a handful of other investments such as additional funding for the Indian Health Service’s sanitation program and increased home energy support for low-income households.²⁴

IIJA funding ran through September 30, 2026, the end of fiscal year 2026, and the current continuing resolution does not extend the investments in Division J of the IIJA—the part of the law that was given a discretionary classification—meaning that the budget is facing a $66 billion shortfall in the current fiscal year.²⁵

In 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law.²⁶ In addition to raising corporate taxes, allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, providing green energy tax credits, and a handful of other changes, the law provided more than $200 billion in appropriated funding.²⁷ This money was primarily used for climate mitigation efforts, such as building out clean energy generation and reducing local pollution, and IRS taxpayer services or tax enforcement to better catch tax cheats.²⁸ The vast majority of this funding has been obligated or rescinded.²⁹

In 2022, President Biden also signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in the aftermath of the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.³⁰ The law aimed to decrease gun violence by closing gun purchasing loopholes, funding mental health and school safety measures, enhancing background checks, and working to tackle gun trafficking.³¹ While most of the law’s policy changes have no sunset period, the law’s final installment of funding came in fiscal year 2026, and no new funding has been made available for fiscal year 2027.³² Unless Congress approves additional funding, these investments are facing a shortfall of more than half a billion dollars this year.

Finally, while it is not an investment, in 2025, President Donald Trump signed into law the Big Beautiful Bill.³³ This law enacted the largest Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts in history while providing enormous tax cuts that disproportionately helped the richest Americans.³⁴ Taken together, it was the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history. In addition to those cuts, the law provided some one-time appropriations, some of which fund activities that are traditionally on the discretionary side of the budget.

Had the authors included all of these sources of funding (though only the portions of them that fund activities that are traditionally on the discretionary side of the budget), after adjusting for inflation and population growth, the 2026 funding would be 9.9 percent below 2023 funding, very similar to the top-line figures produced in this report. However, there would be a noticeable temporary spike in funding in fiscal year 2022.

In contrast, recent temporary funding increases have significantly boosted security discretionary funding, which now stands 16.3 percent higher than it was in 2023 and 16.1 percent higher than it was in 2010, after adjusting for inflation and population growth.³⁵

With such deep cuts to nonsecurity discretionary services enacted in recent years, it is unlikely that there will be enough support to undo all of the harm in a single year. Congress should seek to undo at least one-quarter of the cuts in fiscal year 2027, as well as continue the IIJA funding. At the very least, Congress should not allow the problem to get worse—funding must at a bare minimum keep pace with inflation and population growth.

Congress should also rescind all the still-unobligated money appropriated for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol in both the Big Beautiful Bill and the Secure America Act, which was provided with less oversight and with fewer guardrails or constraints than typical annual appropriations for ICE and Border Patrol.³⁶ The savings from paring back unused funding can be used, at least in part, to directly offset needed increases in domestic discretionary appropriations. Congress should also seek to undo some of the many tax cuts enacted this century in working to further offset needed nonsecurity discretionary funding increases.

Below is a set of key NSD activities and programs that have outsized influence on Americans’ lives. Despite large overall cuts, in recent years some programs have fared well at the expense of others, while others have seen their funding continually slashed. At their current levels, many of these programs fall short of delivering their intended services. This list is not exhaustive; NSD covers a broad array of activities that extend meaningfully beyond those highlighted below.

Long-term investments

Nonsecurity discretionary programs provide most of the federal funding for the nation’s domestic investments. Ultimately, these funds have outsized impacts beyond the scope of the federal programs they finance, serving as instruments in developing social stability, human capital, and innovation to ensure long-term prosperity.

Anti-poverty programs

While most of the nation’s federal anti-poverty work comes from the mandatory part of the budget—through Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, CHIP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and other programs—the domestic discretionary anti-poverty programs nonetheless provide crucial assistance for the vulnerable.

Basic governance functions

The discretionary nonsecurity category also comprises programs that do most of the work running the details of government services, making sure that society functions properly.

Despite not having the same level of advocacy or public attention as many other areas of the federal budget, discretionary nonsecurity programs are crucial to many of the functions of society that people take for granted. From essential anti-poverty work, to investments in the country’s current and future public health and safety, to basic governance, this portion of the budget serves as the backbone of much of American society. Congress has significantly shortchanged domestic priorities in recent years, and it should take active steps in this coming year to significantly start to reverse those cuts.

To construct the top-line figures, the authors started with total nonsecurity discretionary historical funding. The authors removed all one-time emergencies, with the exception of emergency-designated funding that was intended to fund ongoing base operations. The figures therefore include standard nonemergency operations that are typically not considered part of base operations, namely: the funding for disaster response, program integrity, the 21st Century Cures Act, wildfire response, and the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund. The authors removed housing receipts to better estimate gross appropriations rather than net. The authors also removed Census funding. While it is a real part of nonsecurity funding, because Census funding spikes every 10 years, leaving it in would unfairly exacerbate the apparent cut relative to 2010. If the authors had not removed Census funding, the cut since 2010 would appear even larger.

The authors then made a handful of adjustments to make the historical funding more comparable over time, as some programs that were traditionally funded on the discretionary side of the budget moved to the mandatory side, or vice versa, and some programs that were traditionally funded entirely on the discretionary side of the budget now receive partial funding on the mandatory side of the budget, or vice versa. The authors have included the mandatory portion of Community Health Centers, the mandatory portion of the National Health Service Corps, the mandatory portion of Pell Grants, the mandatory portion of the Watershed and Flood Prevention Operations, the mandatory portion of the Utah Reclamation Mitigation and Conservation account, the mandatory Abandoned Mine Land payments to states and Tribes, the mandatory portion of the Superfund, the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund, the mandatory funding for Ultra-Deepwater and Unconventional Natural Gas research and development, the mandatory portion of the NIH that funds diabetes research, the mandatory portion of the Indian Health Service that funds diabetes research, the mandatory supplement to historically Black colleges and universities as well as minority-serving institutions and Upward Bound, the mandatory funding for watershed rehabilitation, the mandatory supplement to the State Health Insurance Assistance Program and Aging Network outreach, the mandatory supplement to Native American water rights settlements, the mandatory Centers for Medicare and Medicaid program management funding, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund transfers to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Prevention and Public Health Fund transfers to discretionary activities. The authors have also included the historical mandatory funding for Highway Trust Fund money for the Appalachian Development Highway System. The authors have removed the discretionary portion of the Promoting Safe and Stable Families program, the historical discretionary portion of transit contract authority, the historical discretionary funding for the Highway Trust Fund’s operations and research, the historical discretionary funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the historical discretionary funding for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, the historical discretionary funding for the Rural Energy for America Program, the historical discretionary funding for the Outreach for Socially Disadvantaged Farmers account, the historical discretionary funding for the Tennessee Valley Authority nonpower programs, the historical discretionary funding for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, and the historical discretionary funding for payments in lieu of taxes. The authors have also removed the discretionary funding that supplements the mandatory Federal-Aid Highway Program contract authority, the discretionary funding that supplements the mandatory Mass Transit Account contract authority, the discretionary funding that supplements the Airport Improvement Program contract authority, and the discretionary funding that supplements Child Nutrition Programs.

This analysis tries to answer how much funding the “discretionary” activities have received over time, not how much appropriators have literally given over time. For that same reason, this analysis also tracks program costs for the Pell Grant program, rather than the amount of budget authority that was appropriated.

Had the authors made none of these adjustments, the cuts would appear larger, but the analysis would be less fair.

The authors also did not incorporate any of the illegal impoundments, including the pocket rescissions, into this analysis (though it does incorporate the legal rescissions).⁹⁵ Had they done so, the cuts would be even deeper.

Real dollar figures in this report are in fiscal year 2027 dollars.

For the alternative analysis, in Figure 6, for both the Inflation Reduction Act and the Big Beautiful Bill, the figures reflect the obligations rather than the lump-sum budget authority. The figures in the alternative analysis also include the funding for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The authors have only included the subset of appropriations in these laws that fund activities that are traditionally on the discretionary side of the budget.

Click here to download backup data. More granular details are on file with the authors.

NDD differs from NSD in the following ways: NDD includes funding for veterans, for international affairs, and for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while NSD does not.⁹⁶ NSD includes a few accounts that are otherwise categorized as defense accounts, while NDD does not.⁹⁷ This analysis focuses on NSD.

By focusing on NSD instead of NDD, this analysis does not incorporate the mandatory DHS funds provided in the two reconciliation bills of the second Trump administration or the mandatory changes in veterans’ medical care. While each of those is technically mandatory, they should nonetheless probably be included in historical NDD (not NSD) levels for a true apples-to-apples comparison about how much funding certain activities received over time. Focusing on NSD also excludes international affairs and therefore does not include either the legal rescissions or the illegal impoundments of foreign aid funds.⁹⁸

The authors would like to thank Alan Cohen, Madeline Shepherd, Corey Husak, Emily Gee, Veronica Goodman, Sara Estep, Ben Greenho, Debu Gandhi, Allison McManus, Leo Banks, Cathleen Kelly, Lucero Marquez, Sara Partridge, Viviann Anguiano, Rachel Cotter Johnson, Jenny Rowland-Shea, Natasha Murphy, Weadé James, Anne Knapke, Chandler Hall, and Amina Khalique for help with research; Chester Hawkins and Bill Rapp for graphic design and data visualization; Christian Rodriguez, Nicole Piper, and Meghan Miller for helpful edits for clarity and readability; and Audrey Juarez for legal review.