type: timeline_event
As Congress completed most fiscal year 2026 appropriations bills, analysis published February 19 revealed that the Trump administration and DOGE had been decisively defeated in their legislative spending-cut agenda. Of 30 major programs sampled that Trump proposed slashing or eliminating outright in his FY2026 budget request, Congress eliminated only one. Of the remaining 29, just two were cut by more than half their previous funding. Most programs were funded flat or received modest increases, with Congress rejecting high-profile DOGE targets including slashing the Education Department, eliminating the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, eliminating the Council on Homelessness, and defunding the National Endowment for Democracy (which instead received $315 million, the same as in FY2024). Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities received full funding of more than $200 million.
The analysis distinguished between DOGE's executive-branch administrative actions - which did succeed in eliminating approximately 317,000 federal jobs and roughly $20 billion in spending through firings, impoundments, and agency restructuring - and its legislative agenda, which largely collapsed. A Cato Institute budget analyst summarized: "Congress largely rejected the discretionary spending cuts President Trump proposed in 2025. The bills just approved for 2026 actually increase spending from 2025."
The finding exposed a central tension in DOGE's strategy: Vought and Musk's approach of unilateral executive branch action succeeded in dismantling personnel and agency capacity, but most underlying statutory funding survived through the appropriations process. The Trump administration moved to compensate with a rescission package - a formal request to Congress to claw back $9.4 billion in already-appropriated funds from USAID, NPR, and PBS - but that package (which later passed in scaled-down form) represented a small fraction of DOGE's originally claimed $2 trillion target. OMB Director Vought testified before House appropriators the same day, defending the administration's approach and hinting at additional rescission requests if the initial attempt succeeded, part of an ongoing effort to use obscure budget tools to circumvent the normal appropriations process.