Every year, Taxpayers for Common Sense wades through hundreds of pages of presidential budget documents so you don’t have to. We look for wasteful spending, gimmicky math, and proposals that don’t add up. But this year, it has been a special treat. The FY2027 Budget is not just a fiscal document; it’s also a branding exercise.
Let’s start with the classics. The Office of Management and Budget uses the phrase “Green New Scam” twenty-one times in the budget document in contexts ranging from trillion-dollar energy policy to a federal webinar about a children’s book. To be clear, “Green New Scam” is not a program, a budget function, or an accounting category. It is a rally chant — one that apparently now doubles as official federal nomenclature.
Then there are the new programs. The Administration proposes consolidating dozens of K-12 education grants into something called “MEGA grants” — that’s Make Education Great Again grants, in case you missed the callback. This is the official name of a federal grant program, in an official budget document, submitted to the United States Congress.
The U.S. used to have a Department of War, but in 1947 that became the Department of the Army and joined with the Department of the Navy under the new Department of Defense. Old is new as Department of Defense is listed in the budget documents as the “Department of War.” Taxpayers spent decades and considerable sums building the brand equity of “Defense.” Apparently, that’s over.
Over at the FAA, the Administration proposes to replace the aging air traffic control system — a genuinely needed investment — with something called the “Brand New Air Traffic Control System,” or BNATCS. What happens when it is no longer brand new? Do we rename it the Somewhat Newer Air Traffic Control System (SNATCS)? The Aging But Still Pretty Good Air Traffic Control System (ABSPGATCS)?
And then there’s the “Working Families Tax Cut Act.” It shows up fifteen times across the budget—cited in the OMB Director’s message and repeated across agencies from Education and Energy to HHS, DHS, Treasury, and even NASA. The legislation it refers to is real—the reconciliation law (P.L. 119-21)—but that’s not what it’s called. Instead, the budget repeatedly substitutes a politically branded title, turning a piece of enacted law into a slogan.
Look, we understand the impulse. Nobody gets excited about “Analytical Perspectives, Appendix Table 2-3.” But there is something genuinely corrosive about a federal budget that reads like a greatest hits album. When program names become slogans and slogans become policy, it gets harder — not easier — to have a real conversation about what taxpayer dollars are doing and whether they’re doing it well.
The deficit is projected to remain above $1 trillion for the foreseeable future. The debt is closing in on $40 trillion. This budget, if enacted, would make that worse, not better. And all of its catchy names won’t fix that.
- Med Badr Chemmaoui for Unsplash
