House Budget Would Allow More Than $100 Billion of New Debt

The House Budget Committee this morning released text of a Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 budget resolution ahead of its committee markup. The budget would allow for $95 billion in primary deficit increases through 2036 via the budget reconciliation process and requires no offsetting spending cuts or revenue increases. This includes $60 billion for the Armed Services Committee, $13 billion for the Intelligence Committee, $12 billion for the Agriculture Committee, and $10 billion for the Administration Committee.

A budget resolution is meant to outline all budgetary priorities – discretionary spending, mandatory spending, and revenues – over the course of the upcoming fiscal year, but this budget appears to be largely intended to unlock the budget reconciliation process.  

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

Lawmakers have once again decided to abandon any semblance of fiscal discipline and allow themselves to add more to our nation’s already massive national debt. This budget resolution continues the recent trend of making a mockery out of the budget process – it’s a false budget purely intended to shuffle through increases in defense funding and other priorities.  

At $95 billion, this budget would allow Congress to add even more to deficits than the last reconciliation bill completed just months ago. At least with that bill, the funding was said to be replacing ordinary appropriations – this funding would be on top of our regular funding. With interest costs, the reconciliation bill could add more than $100 billion to the debt over the next decade.

To require no offsets in this budget is baffling. The only way to ensure reconciliation does not add to deficits is to require commensurate deficit decreases in the budget resolution. The federal government is projected to spend more than $78 trillion before interest costs over the next decade, and Congress cannot bring itself to find 0.1% of that total to cut or any revenue to raise? There are tens of trillions of savings available, most of which can be accomplished in reconciliation. There is simply no excuse to shrug it away.

Reconciliation was created to reduce deficits. At a time when our national debt exceeds the size of the entire economy, deficits are projected to total over $2 trillion this year, and we’re spending more than $1 trillion on interest on the national debt, we should be reducing deficits, not adding to them. A responsible budget resolution would require at least as much savings – ideally twice as much via Super PAYGO – to ensure reconciliation does not add to the debt.

The first rule of getting out of a hole is to stop digging. This budget does the opposite; it puts us even further in the hole, and it’s a terrible missed opportunity to start making progress on getting out. 

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