With a week to sift through the Trump administration’s first full-fledged budget proposal, two inescapable realities have come into sharper focus: the enormous magnitude of the desired cuts in many domestic programs and an utter disdain for numerical integrity.

First, no budget in my 40 years of following fiscal policy has attempted to reallocate outlays as radically as this budget does. Most of the commentary has focused on the cumulative spending changes over the next decade; look instead at the proposed outlays for 2027 to understand the full extent of the proposed shifts.

As the chart below shows, defense receives an increase, Medicare and Social Security retirement are left almost entirely unchanged and pretty much everything else is massively trimmed. (All projected changes are in relation to current law, and these figures are not adjusted for inflation, making the effective cuts from today’s spending levels that much greater.)