The Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday that Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit.
The numbers released Wednesday are the first from Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper on the full bill House Republicans passed last month after a marathon of markups and debate.
Notably, the CBO score is not dynamic, meaning it doesn’t account for the possibility that the legislation would boost economic growth and thus generate new revenues.
Overall, the bill cuts taxes by $3.7 trillion over the next decade. That includes extending the 2017 tax cuts and new tax breaks sought by President Donald Trump. It also includes hundreds of billions of dollars of offsets through cuts to clean energy tax credits and some healthcare premiums.
The legislation also cuts federal spending by $1.3 trillion. Just over $1 trillion of those cuts comes from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is in charge of Medicaid.
Another $230 billion in cuts comes from the House Committee on Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps. Republicans have looked to find savings in programs such as SNAP and Medicaid, much to the chagrin of Democrats.
Some Republicans have pushed for the spending cuts to be higher, and a faction of deficit hawks in the House held out their votes leading up to the House vote to get more assurances on curbing spending.
The new CBO numbers will be fodder for Democrats, who have attacked Republicans for being fiscally irresponsible and adding to the debt. Many Republicans will likely doubt the CBO finding, arguing that the office has a poor track record and might not be accurate in its projections.
Many conservatives are receptive to the argument that an extension of tax cuts should not be deemed an addition to deficits. They believe the economic growth sparked by the tax cuts and other provisions will offset any deficit hits.
One of those people is House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who shepherded the massive legislative bill through the House, holding meetings with competing factions to reach an agreement that narrowly passed.
“It’s not going to add to the debt,” Johnson said over the weekend on NBC’s Meet the Press.
But budget experts have pushed back against those arguments from Republicans.
“So there’s zero question that the current form of the bill adds too much to the debt — we shouldn’t be talking about trillions in new borrowing, we should be talking about trillions in savings,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told the Washington Examiner ahead of the CBO release.
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The sweeping tax legislation now heads to the Senate, where senators will get a chance to amend the reconciliation bill.
It is unclear how much the Senate will change, or how that would change the CBO score, but some senators have made it clear they want to include more spending cuts.
