President Obama won’t be releasing his budget until Tuesday, but many of the items of interest to financial advisors are already known.

Proposals for the 2017 federal fiscal year, from making on-the-job retirement savings plans available to nearly every American worker and a request for a significant increase in Securities and Exchange Commission funding, have already been put forward.

The only thing left for advisors to learn are the details.

Advisors also have to read the budget proposal with the knowledge that much of what it contains may not happen.

The budget road map will be a dead end with a Republican-controlled Congress with no desire to do favors for a Democratic president in an election year.

Since the president’s State of the Union Address last month, the White House has been gradually unveiling elements of its plan to expand retirement savings.

In a Saturday blog, Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan said a key part of the package to improve retirement security will be pilot programs to expand the portability of pensions when people work for many employers during their careers, as most now do,

Late last month, the White House said the retirement package will also include proposals to allow long-time, part-time workers to participate in their employers 401(k) plans and another proposal to automatically enroll workers without a workplace savings plan in IRAs.

The package has also been crafted to encourage more small employers to offer 401(k)s through tax breaks. The proposal also makes it easier for small businesses to join multiple-employer plans that create savings through economies of scale.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has preliminarily requested a 17.5 percent budget increase to $1.9 billion for the fiscal year beginning October 1, the House Financial Services Committee said Tuesday.

However, the Republican-dominated committee said it rejected the SEC’s contention it is significantly underfunded.

Much of the extra funding the SEC has sought from Congress over the last several years has been aimed at increasing the number of financial advisors examined annually--an effort to increase oversight of this growing segment of the financial services industry.

While asking for more money, the SEC said the number of exams was hiked by 10 percent in 2015 and 20 percent the year before.

The SEC has indicated a further increase is in the offing through the switch of some broker-dealer examiners to investment advisor duty and by using some of the additional $100 million the agency is getting for the current fiscal year for more registered investment advisor examiners.

But federal agencies are often faced with a “damned if you do” and “damned if you don’t” attitude by Congress. Increased performance can be used by congressional critics to support the argument that the agency doesn’t need more money.

But if a regulator says poor performance shows more funding is necessary, critics often argue the bad job shows the agency can’t be trusted with additional taxpayer dollars.