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’ nonpartisan scorekeeper on the full bill that House Republicans passed last month after a marathon of markups and debate.
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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 cast doubt on 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. That is because they believe that 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, who shepherded the massive legislative package 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 there will get a chance to amend the reconciliation package.
It is unclear how much the Senate will change — or how that would change its CBO score — but some senators have made it clear they want to include more spending cuts.