(The Center Square) – Despite the White House’s assertions that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will not add to the federal debt or deficit, four independent budget watchdogs agree that debt growth will accelerate and reach over $50 trillion by 2034, if the policy megabill becomes law.
As emphasized Friday by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Budget Lab at Yale predicts $52.3 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office predicts $52.4 trillion, the Tax Foundation predicts $52.8 trillion, and the Penn Wharton Budget Model predicts $56.3 trillion as the national debt number a decade from now.
The national debt is more than $36.2 trillion.
Fiscal scorekeepers have also produced alarming estimates on the bill’s ten-year deficit impact, with the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation predicting it will add up to $4 trillion to the federal deficit.
The existing version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will soon undergo Senate edits, carries such a high price tag because of its size. Passing the U.S. House on a razor-thin margin, it extends key portions of the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for the next 10 years. It would also raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion and fulfill President Donald Trump’s energy, border security and defense agenda.
To offset the bill’s cost, House committees included more than $1.7 trillion in savings in the package, assuming that economic growth from the tax cut extension would cover the rest.
“That 2.6 percent annual average, that conservative growth assumption, will yield $2.5 trillion over the ten-year budget window,” House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, said Thursday. “If you stack the spending reforms – which by the way, are the deepest cuts by two times in our nation’s history – [and] you add the two, you totally offset the cost of border, of defense, and any cost associated with reducing taxes.”
The White House has touted an even rosier picture of economic growth, claiming the bill will produce $4.1 trillion in growth over the next decade.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt condemned the CBO’s predictions as “blatantly wrong,” noting that its predictions result from an “absurd” assumption that long-term economic growth will rise an “anemic” 1.8%.
Both the White House’s and budget scorekeepers’ predictions could change for better or worse, however, depending on how Senate Republicans amend the bill. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has said he wants to find more than $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, on top of what the House already included.
But he’s also considering zeroing out the cost of the tax cut extension, on paper, by using an unconventional scoring method that critics call a gimmick. Adopting a current policy baseline instead of the House’s current law baseline would theoretically allow Senate Republicans to add even more costly wishlist items to the already massive package.
Thune needs the Senate Parliamentarian’s approval to use the current policy baseline. If he obtains that permission, the Senate-amended budget reconciliation bill would, for the first time ever, operate under two different baselines.
