The peculiar fiscal footprint of the Trump administration.

D onald Trump has been pushing hard against the boundaries of presidential authority. But at the core of the separation of powers, where the executive and legislative branches are expected to contend over policy and funding priorities, he has actually been strangely idle.

It may not seem that way at first. This administration began with tumultuous commotion over Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” and all manner of promises and threats about radical spending cuts. There was a freeze on federal grants, talk of restructuring assorted agencies and programs, and a widespread sense that the White House was looking to set up an epic battle over large-scale impoundments — that is, refusals to spend money appropriated by Congress for goals the president does not agree with.

But at the same time, the spending path set out by Congress for the federal government this year has barely changed at all. In March, Congress passed and the president signed a continuing resolution that extended Biden-era appropriations levels through the end of this fiscal year. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the reconciliation measure passed in July — raised spending levels for defense and immigration enforcement but otherwise kept appropriations where they were. One rescission bill has also been enacted into law, rolling back about $9 billion in foreign aid and public-media funds, and the administration has proposed a further rescission of just under $5 billion focused mostly on foreign aid, which it apparently intends to advance as a (legally dubious) “pocket rescission” if Congress does not approve it by the end of the fiscal year. Together, the two would amount to roughly one half of 1 percent of federal spending — not nothing, but not a significant shift in the trajectory of federal finances.

That continuing resolution is now expiring, and the failure to renew or replace it has the government on the verge of a shutdown. But ultimately, this impasse will likely be resolved by keeping things for the most part where they have been. Both the president and congressional Republicans want another CR. Trump has said he would like it to extend through the end of the calendar year. And the challenges of getting real appropriations done at this point mean it might even go through the next fiscal year, continuing Biden-era spending levels and renewing in full all the funding the administration has talked about cutting or refusing to spend.

So what has actually been going on with government spending? The full, detailed picture won’t be known for some time, as final tallies of obligated funds trickle in from the agencies. But the end of the federal fiscal year offers an opportunity for a general accounting that might give us at least a preliminary sense of what all the sound and fury has amounted to.

There are several ways to track federal financing. Individual agencies publish their spending data in various forms, but these tend to lag and are uneven across the government. A useful official website, USASpending.gov, links data from many federal systems to provide a statistical picture, but because the underlying data are not all made available on the same schedule, it is not always handy for uniform real-time assessments of how much money is going out the door.

For that purpose, the best resource is often the unassuming monthly statements put out by the Treasury Department. These are prompt and comprehensive, and they track gross spending across all federal departments and programs. This broad and neutral measure is also especially useful for getting a handle on how this year has been different precisely because the federal government has been funded by a continuing resolution all year. Since appropriations for 2024 and 2025 have been more or less identical, significant differences in actual spending levels between the two years would be driven by administration priorities and actions, and perhaps also by administration resistance to congressional imperatives.

But such variances turn out to be few and far between. The most striking thing about general spending patterns in the second Trump administration so far is how much they resemble Biden-era patterns. Gross spending levels are a little higher this year than last, mostly because of increased entitlement spending and higher interest payments. But the difference is modest, and if you were to judge the state of federal policy by looking at the overall trend of federal spending, you would have to say that little has changed since Trump returned to the White House in January.

There is no hint in these figures that DOGE ever existed, and no evidence of mass disruption or substantial redirection.

Going through the budget department by department in these Treasury figures mostly offers the same impression. The budget of the most expensive cabinet agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, has been just slightly higher this year than last, mostly because of modestly elevated Medicare spending, but has closely tracked Biden’s final year in office. That would also be the case if we focused only on discretionary HHS spending in both years.

The Pentagon budget, which is the government’s second highest, is also only slightly higher, as additional OBBBA-provided spending has not really begun to flow yet.

That’s not to say that no changes are apparent anywhere. The Department of Education’s budget, for instance, does look somewhat different than it did in Joe Biden’s last year in office.

A small portion of this divergence reflects changes in staffing levels, as some employees have been laid off, but most of it at this point appears to be a function of sharply lower disbursements from the Education Stabilization Fund (created under the CARES Act five years ago to help schools address challenges resulting from the Covid pandemic and its aftermath), as well as some reductions in other payments to K–12 schools. These are policy-driven changes (although the Education Stabilization Fund was set to expire in any case), and while some are still being litigated, they are likely to persist.

But these figures do not at this point reflect the more ambitious restructuring of the Department of Education that the administration is pursuing. Despite all that the administration has been saying and doing on this front, it is likely that a continuing resolution for the coming months will fully fund the Education Department at Biden-era levels yet again.

A change of similar magnitude in the opposite direction is evident at the Department of Homeland Security, where immigration-enforcement funds have increased, and were growing even before the infusion from the OBBBA.

This difference clearly does reflect a change in policy priorities. Because DHS is relatively small, compared to HHS and the Pentagon, this is not a change that dramatically alters the overall trajectory of federal spending, but it certainly does show what distinctly different administration priorities would look like if they were reflected in spending. So the change in immigration-enforcement spending is very real, but it highlights how little things have changed in the broader federal budget.

For the most part, the administration has followed Congress’s appropriations instructions and does not seem to be looking for a big fight over impoundment. This has been evident even in programs that have been through a very tumultuous nine months.

The budget of the National Institutes of Health provides a prime example. Early in the year, the administration made a point of withholding NIH funds and reconsidering all of the agency’s grants, sowing panic and confusion among biomedical researchers and leaving many observers assuming that the NIH might be the focal point of a future impoundment fight. But the spending data suggest the White House changed its mind about pursuing such a clash.

Here, the monthly Treasury statements are less illuminating, because they do not break down spending into grant and non-grant categories. But the agency makes up-to-date information available through the NIH RePorter portal. A summary view of that data over the past year looks like this:

This pattern broadly resembles those found by more in-depth tracking by Megan Molteni, Anil Oza, and J. Emory Parker of Stat News, and by Jeremy Berg, a former NIH employee who has been carefully following the agency’s detailed grant reporting. It suggests that the NIH began the year far behind its 2024 pace of grant funding, but that a decision was made at some point in late spring or early summer to avert an impoundment fight by dramatically accelerating the disbursement of grants.

This was achieved in no small part by funding multi-year grants all at once, beginning in late spring, in order to spend appropriated money much more quickly. As a consequence, the agency is funding a significantly smaller number of grants this year than last (at this point about 30 percent fewer, according to NIH RePorter data) but spending the same amount of money. A lot of projects have been left unfunded, although it’s likely that if the NIH intends to fully spend its appropriated budget next year (when it will probably receive the same amount of funding, under another continuing resolution), it will need to fund a larger number of new grants than it has in recent years. That could be an opportunity for researchers who have not received NIH funding in the past, but the uncertainty and instability involved threaten to seriously undermine American biomedical science — and indeed, already have.

The intense effort to make sure that all appropriated money will be spent suggests that a major battle over the impoundment power is no longer an objective of the administration’s fiscal strategy. But the story of NIH spending also points to another facet of that strategy. In many agencies and programs, the administration has moved to deploy the president’s authority over grants and contracts to drive policy change — exercising focused discretionary power case by case rather than seeking negotiated overall policy paths, and so seeking policy progress by pushing the bounds of executive power at the margins rather than deploying such power through traditional means at the core of the system.

That approach yields a lot of noise, because it creates numerous instances of specific grantees or contractors replaced by other specific grantees or contractors for political or policy reasons. But it drives far less broad and durable change. It takes up a lot of news cycles but ultimately offers less of an opportunity for transformative redirection than traditional policymaking would.

So while the administration has pursued some meaningful policy changes, these are nearly invisible in the patterns of federal spending so far. And they also don’t really show themselves in other traditional measures of federal government action over the past nine months.

For instance, although President Trump began his term with his party controlling both houses of Congress (as has every newly elected president since Bill Clinton), he has signed fewer bills into law in his first nine months than any of his recent predecessors, and even than he himself did in his first term.

Simply counting bills is obviously a crude measure of activity, and fewer bills might not signify less action if they were highly substantive and ambitious. But this session of Congress has been largely devoid of such ambition, and the reconciliation bill has so far been the one genuinely significant, substantive measure. The Trump administration is clearly not prioritizing legislative action.

Moreover, and maybe more surprisingly, the pace of substantive administrative action in this presidency has so far been historically slow. Trump has signed many vague executive orders, but when it comes to significant substantive rulemaking, he has been well behind his recent predecessors.

A series of executive orders since 1993 have defined “significant rules” and “economically significant rules” (you can find those definitions here). These are not ideal categories, as they can sometimes be vague and manipulable, but they are useful general markers of regulatory actions with especially large consequences. The Federal Register allows you to easily track significant rules, and by that measure the current administration is well behind all of its modern predecessors.

The Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University also tracks economically significant rules (which are fewer but generally have even greater impact), and while its figures so far run only through June, they paint a very similar picture.

The only recent presidency that had such a slow start in rulemaking was Trump’s own first term. That time around, Trump’s team was unprepared and inexperienced, and the administration often lacked a clear policy direction. This time, it is harder to explain the drift.

Trump officials who have witnessed it from the inside suggest that DOGE was a costly distraction in the essential first few months of the administration, and that it also led to the departure of some experienced lawyers in the General Counsel’s offices at many agencies around the government, thus slowing the process of drafting and clearing rules. Some also point to persistent recalcitrance at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House team (within the Office of Management and Budget) that has to clear all new rules.

But whatever the causes, the pattern so far seems clear: The administration is using the president’s implicit discretion over grants and contracts to channel federal money to favored causes and away from projects it deems contrary to the president’s priorities. But Trump is not deploying the formal powers of his office in the policy process as aggressively as have most modern presidents. He has exercised retail pressure more than wholesale power.

For the moment, that does not appear to be changing. Amazingly, Trump and his team seem content to keep in place the spending levels approved by Joe Biden and the last Congress through perhaps as much as half of Trump’s second term. No recent president has surrendered his role in the formal federal budget process like this. The Trump team will surely move some aggressive administrative rules and regulations over time, but it has been slow to prioritize them, which will give it less of an opportunity to advance, adjudicate, and implement those actions. Trump is doing all manner of things that presidents don’t normally do, but he is not doing much of the executive’s more fundamental work in the policymaking process, at least outside of one or two key policy domains.

Trump’s second presidency may yet be transformative. But for now, the most transformative action is happening in the realm of the structural Constitution, not in the policy arena.

For the country, that is not good news. Trump and his team are intent on leaving behind a stronger, less restrained, and more domineering, bullying, and personalist executive at a time when presidents have already grown much too strong and Congress increasingly feeble. But in comparison with most recent administration, they are doing less traditional legislative negotiation and perhaps even less regulatory work.

It is much too early to draw conclusions. But that combination of aggressive action at the margins and weakness at the core could ultimately define Trump’s legacy.