[lamasery]

You would get so much weird shit happening if you did this.

For example, if you ask your average normal person who's critical of foreign aid spending how much they think we should spend on it, if they don't answer "zero dollars" (and most don't!) they're very likely to name a percent of the budget that would represent a huge increase in our foreign aid spending. This is because they think it's a far larger part of the budget than it is (probably because it's received such a huge amount of attention that they assume it must be a lot, or else why would their trusted media figures complain about it so much?)

Misconceptions like that abound. Like, you wanna guess where most people are gonna shift some of that money if you remind them to make sure they allow enough funding for maintaining our nuclear weapon stockpile, but don't tell them exactly where to put that money? I bet it's not the Department of Energy.

Moreover, this would just incentivize politicians for both nefarious and benevolent reasons to bundle unrelated stuff into departments that people choose to fund better, laundering their popularity into necessary-but-obscure services or pet-project/corruption stuff.