The process of crafting and passing legislation has often been compared to sausage-making, insofar as most people enjoy eating sausage, but virtually no one wants to watch discarded animal parts getting ground into a paste and stuffed in a tube.

The process of proposing, debating and passing a federal budget is similar. The results may be generally agreeable, but the process that creates them can be ugly in the extreme.

The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress made sausage during the budget process. Lofty aspirations and bright ideas, slowly and inexorably, were ground into a paste made of compromise and mediocrity. Almost certainly, the final result is a budget that does not radically change the shape and extent of the federal government, from one fiscal year to the next.

Republicans, conservatives and Trumpers, however, have another reason to view the final federal budget as letting them, and the country, down, and that’s because President Trump’s initial budget request was evasive and inadequate in addressing the most pressing problem our nation faces: runaway and unsustainable federal spending, out of line with revenues, and overly reliant on borrowing.

At first glance, President Trump’s budget for fiscal year 2026 looks like a dream-come-true for Republicans and conservatives. It slashed non-defense discretionary spending by 23%. When one digs into the weeds further, though, much of the envisaged savings comes from eliminating almost all “emergency” expenditures. In other words, if one assumes that there won’t be any natural disasters, fires, pandemics or other unforeseen calamities in 2026, then Trump’s rosy forecast might actually come true.

But life being the endless string of surprise setbacks that it is, these savings are speculative, at best. In fact, “base discretionary” spending, according to Trump’s initial request, would not decline at all. It would remain flat.

But, you may be saying to yourself, even holding federal spending level from one year to the next is a HUGE accomplishment, no?

But the worst news is yet to come. Discretionary spending, i.e. spending that isn’t “automatic” and/or mandated by previous legislation, represents only 26% of the federal budget as a whole. How is this possible? Because big fiscal commitments like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and servicing the national debt are all … separate. They are “non-discretionary” items that Trump and friends decided not to mention in their request to Congress. We have no idea how much the federal government will spend on these mandatory budget lines in the year ahead, based on Trump’s budget, but we have plenty of ideas based on past trends.

In short, these expenditures will go up … a lot!

To take Medicare as an example. Since the year 2000, the growth in federal spending on healthcare for seniors has averaged 6.5% per year. In no year since 2000 did the GDP grow as much as 6.5%, meaning that, every single year, the burden of funding Medicare becomes harder and harder for the nation to bear, and the percentage of the federal budget that must go towards meeting these obligations goes up, up and up.

The same logic holds for Social Security and Medicaid, meaning that, since Trump has proposed no major changes to these programs overall federal spending on these “non-discretionary” items will rise significantly in 2026, as it does every year.

But, you may be saying to yourself, the Democrats keep telling me that “Orange Man Bad” wants to cut Medicaid to the bone, and he wants every poor person to die in the gutter.

Well, that narrative may have been slightly oversold. The truth is that Trump and Republicans’ reforms to Medicaid could reduce its rate of growth (gasp!), but the most important changes are not supposed to take effect until … 2027, meaning that Congress will have plenty of time to walk them back.

What, then, have we learned in the course of this exploration of the political debate over Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget? The truth is that, by avoiding any immediate or meaningful cuts to “mandated” spending on so-called “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Trump/GOP budget won’t significantly reduce spending — and it might increase it.

Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans got major tax cuts that, by themselves, could add trillions to the deficit and the national debt over the next 10 years.

The upshot, then, is that ordinary Americans like you and me should enjoy the the tax cuts while we can, because Trump and Republicans in Congress haven’t altered our unsustainable fiscal trajectory at all — unless, by “altered,” we mean “made it marginally worse.”

The “big, beautiful bill” has many excellent features, and it may — it should — lead to higher rates of economic growth. What it won’t do, unfortunately, is change the fact that this is a country seemingly hell-bent on spending beyond its means, and which presumably will keep on doing so until its creditors cry out, “No more!”

(Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an associate professor of history at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.)