President Trump Releases His FY 2027 Budget
On April 3, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the proposed U.S. Budget for the year beginning October 1, 2026. This budget next goes to Congress, where it will be divided into a dozen appropriation bills that must be adopted by that date. Given the hotly contested mid-term elections, experts predict that Congress will pass a continuing resolution and leave the hard budget debates to the lame-duck session that follows the election, allowing the unprecedented number of retiring members to make the final call.
Federal law requires the President to send the budget to Congress by the first Monday in February, and the White House did not explain its delay this year. However, Trump’s Truth Social posting on January 7, 2026, proposed that the FY27 budget would allocate $1.5 trillion rather than $1 trillion to defense spending (3 months before the intervention in Iran).
The next step will be for senior leaders of the Trump Administration to testify before various Congressional Committees and for Democratic leaders to pronounce the budget “Dead on Arrival.” The Democrats on the House Budget Committee issued a critique the same day, saying it “puts America last.” The American Association of Universities (AAU) said:
“We urge Congress, as they did with the FY26 budget, to reject these short-sighted cuts and increase investments in America’s scientific enterprise to ensure that our nation continues to lead the world – and that all Americans keep benefiting from the greatest research-and-innovation engine the world has ever known.”
Meanwhile, Cornell is in the final stages of adopting its budget for July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027, with key factors such as tuition, housing and dining, and other costs announced following the March Trustee meeting. Cornell receives over $1 billion in annual federal appropriations and grants. As shown by the 2025 federal freeze on Cornell’s research funding, Cornell’s budget is very dependent upon decisions that might not be made until the end of its fall semester. Also, Federal fiscal policy will have a big impact on the performance of Cornell’s $12 billion endowment.
Federal Budget Details
As President Trump announced, defense spending was set at $1.5 trillion, a $445 billion increase above this year, with $1.15 billion coming from annual appropriations and the remaining $350 billion from the budget reconciliation process. Because the budget does not propose any new revenue sources, this results in $5,921 billion in revenues and a projected FY 2027 deficit of $2,171.9 billion. In this context, the FY2027 budget proposes to cap non-defense discretionary spending at $675 billion. This means that appropriations committees would approve an unprecedented $83 billion in non-defense budget cuts.
For the Department of War budget, the document promises:
“The Budget proposes to maximize value to the American taxpayer by ceasing unnecessary spending and excessive bureaucracy while driving actionable reform, including measurable progress on the audit. The Budget continues to eliminate millions of wasteful and egregious spending related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and other “woke” policies, sustaining the more than $1.6 billion in reductions that the Administration has already identified. The savings from these wasteful programs has been reallocated toward Administration priorities to revive the warrior ethos.”
The budget promises to eliminate “billions in non-aligned grants, contracts, and research efforts.”
Other items of interest to Cornell are that the Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) will be cut 19%, but the budget does not mention cuts to Cooperative Extension or the Agricultural Research Service. However, the budget singled out the “Dairy Discovery 5K and Fun Run at Willow Bend Farm in Shortsville, New York” for scorn as an example of what needed to be cut.
The budget proposes to cut $1.6 billion in NOAA research grants, including climate change research.
Pell Grants, for low-income college students, would be increased by $10.5 billion to $33 billion. At the same time, the budget would cut $2.7 billion in higher education programs at the Department of Education that OMB views as promoting “woke” causes.
The Office of Science in the Department of Energy would be cut by $1.1 billion.
The budget would prohibit grant recipients from recovering the cost of academic publication or subscription fees. Currently, many academic journals charge authors a per-page fee to print their articles, and the authors then charge those fees back to their federal research grants. A new government-wide policy would prohibit federal reimbursement of those fees, as well as the cost of subscriptions to academic journals.
For the sixth time, the budget proposes to eliminate the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG), saving $775 million. CSBG replaced a number of specialized programs to help communities address poverty and promote resident self-sufficiency. The budget also proposes a $5 billion cut in the National Institutes of Health budget, down 12.3%.
The budget proposes to save $53 million by privatizing TSA security at smaller airports. (One can assume that Ithaca would be classified as a smaller airport.) Congress is unlikely to adopt such a plan because it was the inadequate private screening at a small airport that allowed the 9-11 hijackers to board flights that transferred at larger airports to the targeted planes. The budget also proposes to abolish the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the Department of Homeland Security.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development proposes to cut $3.3 billion in Community Development Block Grants (CDBG).
The budget proposes to save $1.6 billion by ending the Jobs Corps.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) would be cut from $8.8 billion to $4 billion, down 54%.
Cornell Lobbying
To minimize the federal budget’s adverse impact on Cornell, President Michael Kotlikoff and other senior leadership, in conjunction with various trade associations, such as the AAU, have been lobbying in Washington. New York labor and agricultural organizations have historically also advocated for many of the federal programs that support Cornell. Cornell has also retained its own lobbyists.
According to the Open Secrets website, Cornell spent $1,254,000 in Total Lobbying Expenditures in 2025. Cornell’s filing with the U.S. Senate shows lobbying for the FY 2026 appropriations in areas such as USDA, and competitive grants awarded by NSF, NIH, NASA, and the Department of Energy. Cornell also lobbied against the endowment tax or changes to the method of recovering indirect research costs. As shown by the above graph, Cornell spent a record amount on lobbying in 2025.
Prof. David Bateman, Government, as President of the Cornell Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said,
“The best that can be said about the president’s budget is that it will likely suffer the same experience as most, DOA in a Congress that will ultimately determine for itself what spending should look like. It is nonetheless worrisome for two reasons: (1) budgets signal the priorities of the administration, and the process of setting these priorities will shape administrative activities, even if this budget is tossed right into a Capitol Hill dumpster. Those priorities point to a continued commitment to shredding investment in higher education and research; (2) this administration has shown a willingness to break the law and Constitution when it comes to respecting Congress’s spending authority. The commitment to higher education, including the broad federal investments in research across disciplines, was undertaken by Congress, has been renewed by Congress for decades, and any serious revision to its terms should be from Congress. The administration’s demonstrated willingness to subvert Article 1 is not the most obviously unjust action of this administration, but it is the one most subversive of constitutional government. Congress should ignore this budget, set its own priorities, and then act to enforce them.”
As the FY 2027 budget fight kicks off, it is clear that the stakes are high and that OMB has once again targeted higher education for reductions.
