Hard decisions need to be made, and some experts think the best way to do so would be through some form of bipartisan fiscal commission, which would give lawmakers some political cover while showing markets and investors that the United States is serious about righting its fiscal ship.

Calls for some sort of bipartisan solution also come as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the country can simply “grow our way out” of the debt, a prospect that most economists argue is not feasible.

The stakes

The stakes are high, which is why solutions like a fiscal commission are important to consider, according to budget experts.

The debt first crossed the $1 trillion mark in 1981, but lawmakers of both parties have done little to reduce debt and deficits since the temporary run of balanced budgets from fiscal 1998 through fiscal 2001.

This month, the Treasury Department confirmed a $1.8 trillion deficit in the first 10 months of fiscal 2026.

In February, the Congressional Budget Office projected that federal debt held by the public would reach 101% of GDP this year. By 2030, debt will exceed 108% of GDP, surpassing the all-time high during World War II. The CBO said debt is projected to be 175% of GDP by 2056.

In its report, the CBO warned of “far-reaching implications” if debt continues to grow faster than GDP, including the risk of a financial crisis.

“The risk of a fiscal crisis — that is, a situation in which investors lose confidence in the value of the U.S. government’s debt — would increase,” the report reads. “Such a crisis would cause interest rates to rise abruptly and other economic and financial disruptions to occur.”

And, in the worst-case scenario, a fiscal crisis could throw the economy into disarray, spiking unemployment and exploding inflation.

What could a fiscal commission do?  

The form of a fiscal commission is open to debate. But it would likely be bicameral and bipartisan, and could also include outside experts who would help give recommendations.

Most importantly, the commission could provide political cover for lawmakers who would be forced to vote for tax hikes or politically damaging spending cuts.

“I think it’s a fair point that given the political realities, a fiscal commission seems like the best path to move forward,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told the Washington Examiner.

“In that we know that the real solutions are challenging and difficult, and a fiscal commission provides a chance for members to actually get to know each other on the issue,” she said. “It gives them a chance to become more educated and build expertise on the issue.”

But she emphasized the political cover it gives. A lawmaker who backed the reforms put forward by the commission could tell voters that they would have preferred to do it differently, but voted in favor of the overall legislation for the good of the country.

Many argue that, to address the overall debt problem, a fiscal commission would have to not only propose politically unpopular spending cuts but also would have to put forward tax increases.

Shai Akabas, the vice president of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said that in an ideal world, Congress would operate under regular order, meeting the moment to develop solutions that would fix fiscal problems.

“But we’ve been waiting for that to happen for about a quarter century now and haven’t seen progress,” Akabas told the Washington Examiner. “So we do need to think about alternative options, alternative methods.”

Ryan Young, an economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, highlighted the level of political polarization in Washington, which endangers bipartisan efforts to lower the debt and deficits.

“In private, I think just about every congressman understands the gravity of the situation: in public, none of them will act on it,” Young said. “The Republicans, because they don’t want to go against the administration, and the Democrats, because — at least right now — they don’t want to give anything that might look like a win to the Republicans.”

Still, there is some skepticism about whether a bipartisan fiscal commission would actually produce results.

Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told the Washington Examiner that, at the very least, the formation of a commission would signal “that something absolutely needs to be done,” but she has mixed feelings about whether it would succeed.

De Rugy said that the lack of involvement by the entire Congress in regular order could backfire.

“Basically, that if they’re going to be getting the blame for passing the reforms, they’d rather actually really be engaged in the solution, right, rather than taking on what a commission has decided,” de Rugy said.

She also pointed out the sheer scale of the issues at play, noting that any realistic proposal would likely have to address spending through Social Security and Medicare, both popular programs.

Akabas also said that a better way to proceed would be to work on these issues incrementally, taking several bites from the apple.

“Whether it’s the whole debt problem, whether it’s the 75-year solvency of Social Security problem, we can look at incremental solutions that will improve the situation, and that’s a much more realistic perspective to have in terms of how Congress often deals with these issues,” he said. “So we need to be looking to make progress, not necessarily to solve the entire thing in one fell swoop.”

Still, former Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, who is now the executive director of the Concord Coalition, which focuses on balancing the budget, told the Washington Examiner that just taking the step forward with forming a commission would show that the Trump administration is at least taking the problem seriously.

“I would love to see a series of plans like that, that the president starts to put on the table and starts to close the gap,” Bourdeaux said. “And I think that would definitely help reassure the bond market that there’s actually going to be a push to try to resolve the problem.”

Mixed past results

Past commissions have had mixed results.

The Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, commission, was one example of a success for proponents of a fiscal commission.

In that case, the U.S. needed to close dozens of military installations across the country in the wake of the Cold War. But individual lawmakers had incentives to keep bases in their districts, so the decision on which bases would be closed or consolidated was left to a commission.

The BRAC commission would make a list, and Congress could not decide to tick individual bases off the package. Ultimately, more than 350 military installations were closed or consolidated.

“That gave the congressmen who did have to close bases in their district some political cover, so they could do the right thing,” Young said. “So everyone knew what the right thing to do was, they just didn’t have the incentive to do it.”

The National Commission on Social Security Reform, dubbed the Greenspan Commission after its chair, Alan Greenspan, was a bipartisan commission formed in the early 1980s to make tough choices as Social Security was facing an imminent financing crisis.

Congress ultimately accepted and enacted the commission’s recommendations, which kept Social Security afloat.

“It was successful in the sense that it signaled to investors that Congress was somewhat committed to some fiscal backing behind the commitment it was making for Social Security,” de Rugy said, but she pointed out that it wasn’t successful in solving all of the problems that the entitlement program had and merely kicked the can down the road.

A failure was the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, known as the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which was formed in 2010 and designed to reduce the deficit.

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The bipartisan commission came up with $4 trillion in deficit reduction through spending cuts and through increasing revenues. But Congress never enacted the legislation.

Akabas said the commission was successful in drawing attention to the issues at hand, but because it was such a “grand bargain” of recommendations, it included too many provisions that lawmakers on the Left and Right didn’t like.