To, to what extent is that a problem for you, and how do you, how do you deal with that?

Sure.

Um, so to start off, you know, there has been some prior, uh, research that has looked at whether or not presidents are engaging in this strategic behavior.

Uh, most directly, uh, there's a paper by Chon Rogowski that came out recently that, that tests for this.

Um, and I think there's some good theoretical reasons why presidents would be, in some ways, truthful with their proposals.

You know, they're, they have-- playing a repeated game with Congress, if they start to inflate this year, um, then Congress will essentially assume that their proposals going forward are also going to be inflated or, you know, es-es-especially, uh, cut.

And so I think that pushes presidents to, to, to be truthful.

Presidents look like they're influential, but it's really just that they're better at predicting how much is actually gonna be spent in each area.