Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma is the Republican chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee responsible for the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services—by far the largest subsection of the domestic budget. When I interviewed him on Friday, he initially conceded that critics had “a fair point” in saying that the spending bill largely fulfilled Obama’s domestic wishes. Cole put the onus on Trump and the Republican leadership, which agreed to the trade of significantly higher domestic spending for the increase in defense money. By virtue of the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, Democrats had leverage, and they used it, he said. “We ended up spending a lot more money than we wanted to because the Senate rules put the Democrats in the game,” Cole said. “They’re not going to give their votes away for free.”

But Cole went on to argue that the spending allotments domestically did not so much reflect Democratic priorities as they were “congressional priorities” that lawmakers in both parties backed. Republicans used the higher budget caps to steer money toward programs that they had historically supported, like medical research at the National Institutes of Health, Native American programs, or the college preparatory initiatives Gear Up and TRIO. “There's a lot more money for NIH than Barack Obama proposed in any budget,” Cole said. “There's a lot more money for Native American programs than he ever proposed.”

He continued: “To say this is the Barack Obama domestic budget is just not true. To say that we're spending more domestically than we wanted to do is true. But we did that in order to get the defense spending.”

As Cole noted, no presidential budget “survives contact with Congress.” Power of the purse is one of the few remaining powers that legislators on Capitol Hill guard jealously, and even Obama did not secure all of his priorities when Democrats controlled the House and Senate early in his term. But the degree to which a Republican-controlled Congress rejected out of hand most of the proposals for a Republican president is stark, and it can be explained by a couple of factors.

For one, just about everyone in Washington understood Trump’s budget—both in his first year and the one he presented in February—to be a reflection not so much of the president’s wishes as it was those of Mick Mulvaney, his conservative budget director. Mulvaney, a former South Carolina congressman, has little pull on Capitol Hill beyond the hardline House Freedom Caucus that he helped to found. By the time he released his second budget earlier this year, Mulvaney acknowledged himself that it was little more than “a messaging document.”

Beyond a few big-ticket items like the border wall and added defense spending, Trump made little personal effort to insist on the cuts his budget proposed, and nor, for the most part, did his lieutenants. “I don't think they were as deeply involved at the subcommittee and committee levels as Obama or Bush,” Cole said. “This administration will probably get there, but it may take a while.”