CRFB Reaction to House Reconciliation Passage

The House of Representatives passed its Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 budget reconciliation bill, which now moves to the Senate for its consideration. The bill would add roughly $3 trillion to the debt including interest over the next decade. The bill also includes several policy expirations to artificially lower the deficit impact of its tax cuts and spending increases; making those provisions permanent would lead the bill to adding roughly $5 trillion to the debt, including interest.

The following is a statement from Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

This plan is nothing short of a fiscal failure. It adds massively to the national debt, it relies on timing gimmicks and false claims about growth, it fails to make the structural spending reforms we desperately need, and it uses the important savings it does find to partially offset tax cuts rather than reduce the debt.  

The fact that lawmakers passed this bill less than a week after America’s latest credit downgrade and yet another worrying Treasury auction is especially maddening. Will nothing wake our leaders up to the need to take our debt challenges seriously?  

We embrace Treasury Secretary Bessent’s goal of bringing the deficit down to 3 percent of GDP, and yet this bill moves us in the wrong direction and would boost the deficit to around 7 percent of GDP, more than double the target.  

And at a time when we need serious plans to reduce deficits and address rising government spending, this bill lowers projected spending by around 1 percent while increasing deficits by closer to 15 percent or more. While some are heralding this as a major success in controlling spending, spending would continue to grow rapidly after this bill – totaling about $85 trillion through 2034, compared to nearly $86 trillion under the current baseline.  

With debt approaching record levels and interest costs surging, approving another $3 trillion of borrowing right now is nothing short of negligence.

When this bill makes its way to the Senate, it has a long road ahead of it in order to be considered responsible. We urge the Senate to work to craft a smart package that addresses these issues with the seriousness their colleagues on the other side of the Capitol were unable to muster. 

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For more information, please contact Matt Klucher, Assistant Director for Media Relations, at klucher@crfb.org.