Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer signaled this week that Democrats intend not only to reverse many of the spending cuts achieved under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) but also to drive federal outlays even higher as Congress haggles over the 2026 budget.
According to The Post Millennial, Schumer made his remarks Thursday at a Center for American Progress forum, where he was pressed on whether he would seek to refill the coffers of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. If you look at the budget were working on right now, we restore most of the cuts. And even go higher than previous years on many of the programs that DOGE slashed, Schumer said.
The Democratic leader boasted that his party had already secured cross-aisle backing for undoing much of the Trump-era cost-cutting. We have worked really hard and gotten bipartisan support to increase these amounts and undo a lot of the cuts which are essential.
Yet Schumer declined to identify which specific programs he aims to bolster, leaving taxpayers in the dark as to where billions in new spending would flow. Lawmakers have also not released the final legislative text for the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026.
The Senate Appropriations Committee has floated a plan that would hike funding for that bill by roughly $5 billion over fiscal year 2025 levels. Negotiations with the more fiscally cautious House, however, remain unresolved.
DOGE, created during the Trump administration and overseen by Elon Musk, has been praised by Republicans for rooting out entrenched waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal bureaucracy. According to the DOGE website, the initiative has eliminated $215 billion in wasteful spending.
Of that total, Republicans successfully locked in $115 billion in reductions through legislation enacted last year, a rare victory for taxpayers in an era of runaway deficits. Since that bill passed, no additional rescissions package has moved, even though such measures allow Congress to fast-track spending cuts requested by the president.
GOP lawmakers insist the reform push has not stalled, but is continuing away from the cameras. Rep. Aaron Bean, chairman of the House DOGE Caucus, told Fox News in December that the effort was far from over, saying, DOGE is still alive, and, Were going to get it rocking. I think that will come down the road.
Bean noted that the recent government shutdown, driven in part by disputes over COVID-era Obamacare tax credits, temporarily derailed momentum for further reductions. The shutdown set everybody back a little bit, he said, underscoring the broader fight between those seeking to rein in Washingtons excess and Democrats now openly campaigning to restoreand expandthe very spending DOGE was designed to cut.
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