Will the Trump Administration Refuse to Put Out a Budget and Just Spend Away?

This is interesting speculation from Paul Krugman and also Stan Collender at Forbes.

Krugman writes:

[W]e can expect radical lack of transparency to be standard operating procedure in the new administration. In fact, it has already started.

Take, for example, the budget process. Normally, an incoming administration issues a fiscal plan conveying its priorities soon after taking office. But as the budget expert Stan Collender notes, there are strong indications that the Trump administration will ignore this precedent (and, possibly, the law) and simply refuse to offer any explanation of how its proposals are supposed to add up. All we’ll get, probably, are assurances that it’s going to be great, believe me.

And this from Collender:

The Trump administration is seriously thinking about not submitting a budget to Congress next year .

Although the Congressional Budget Act requires the president to submit the fiscal 2018 budget to Congress between January 2 and February 6, Trump could easily say that it was the responsibility of the outgoing Obama administration to comply with the law before the new president was sworn in on January 20.

But while the new president not sending a budget to Congress might not be illegal, it would clearly be unprecedented.

Every in-coming president since the Congressional Budget Act went into effect in the mid-1970s has submitted a budget. In many years, those budgets (or amendments to the outgoing president’s final budget) were submitted months after the first-Monday-in-February deadline and were truncated versions of the usual multi-volume presentation. But, a fiscal plan with the new president’s priorities was consistently released for over 4 decades.

A Presidential budget is something that needs to be taken with a bagful of salt since it always underestimates expenses and overestimates revenue but at least it provides some sense of the direction of an Administration. To not put one out at all is bordering on bizarre--another move into Banana Republic land.

 -RW