Primary federal actors affected:

• Congressional Budget Office (CBO): must expand publication of analytical tools, models, and (where permitted) underlying data and code. This increases transparency but requires investment in documentation, legal review, and publication infrastructure; CBO also will need processes for identifying nondisclosable items and managing controlled access.

• Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the President's budget office: must develop and publish zero‑based budgeting guidelines, review and incorporate comprehensive justifications for every activity, and adapt budget submission formats to cover two fiscal years in odd‑numbered years. This imposes substantial analytic and coordination work on OMB and agency budget examiners.

• Federal agencies and program managers: required to prepare detailed activity‑level justifications, legal bases, cost analyses, alternative funding scenarios, and performance/efficiency metrics for inclusion in the President's budget. Agencies will face higher administrative workload, possible reallocation of staff toward documentation and performance measurement, and potential program reviews that could influence funding decisions.

• Congress (Members, committees, and staff): must adapt to a biennial budgeting cadence, revised allocation rules, and stronger points of order in the Senate. Budget committees and authorizing/appropriations committees will revise timetables, and floor strategy must account for tougher waiver thresholds and the new surgical strike mechanism. Increased transparency from CBO may affect legislative drafting and oversight but sensitive nondisclosure limits remain.

• Public stakeholders, researchers, and outside budget model users: greater access to CBO methods and (where allowed) data will improve external analysis, oversight, and replication of cost estimates; however, some proprietary or classified inputs may remain restricted with only summary statistics made public.

Potential consequences and tradeoffs:

• Administrative costs will rise as federal offices create the documentation, IT, and processes needed to publish models, justify activities, and support biennial submissions. Smaller program offices may be stretched by new reporting duties.

• Transparency gains could improve public trust, external peer review, and legislative accountability, but risks include politicization of model choices, legal disputes over nondisclosure, and challenges protecting classified or proprietary inputs.

• Zero‑based expectations may encourage efficiency reviews and program scrutiny, but they also risk destabilizing programs that rely on multi‑year implementation or that require annual funding flexibility.

• Biennial budgeting may offer longer planning horizons and reduce the frequency of year‑end continuing resolutions, but it may also complicate responses to unexpected economic changes or emergencies and concentrate contentious decisions into the biennial calendar.

Overall, the legislation restructures budget transparency and process, producing stronger procedural controls and analytic disclosure while creating substantial implementation burdens and potential operational and political frictions.