How Much Did President Biden Add to the Debt?

Over the four years of President Biden’s term – from January 2021 through January 2025 – we estimate that he approved $4.7 trillion in new ten-year debt through legislation and executive actions.

This builds on our previous analysis of how much Presidents Biden and Trump had approved in new ten-year debt during their terms. President Biden approved an additional $380 billion in his final weeks in office by signing into law the American Relief Act and the Social Security Fairness Act. Estimates are based on scores and budget windows at the time of enactment.

The $4.7 trillion in net new ten-year debt approved by President Biden includes $6.6 trillion of deficit-increasing actions and $1.9 trillion of deficit-reducing actions. Excluding the $2.1 trillion from the American Rescue Plan (ARP), which was enacted in March 2021 to further provide broad economic relief during the COVID-19 pandemic, President Biden approved $4.5 trillion of new gross ten-year debt and over $2.6 trillion in new net ten-year debt.

How Much Ten-Year Debt Did Biden Approve?

Source: CRFB estimates based on CBO scores at the time of passage and OMB estimates.
Figures are rounded to the nearest $10 billion and include interest.

In addition to the ARP, President Biden signed a number of fiscally significant pieces of legislation into law. Our estimates attribute $520 billion of the veterans’ benefits expansion under the Honoring our PACT Act,¹ $440 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law, $230 billion from expand Social Security benefits to retirees with alternative public pensions under the so-called Social Security Fairness Act, and $360 billion in other legislation including the CHIPS and Science Act and various other supplemental appropriations laws. He also signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which was initially scored as reducing deficits by $240 billion (or $250 billion with interest savings) but is likely closer to budget neutral after its implementation.

On full-year appropriations, President Biden’s actions were roughly a wash. On a combined basis, the appropriations bills for Fiscal Years (FY) 2022 through 2024 increased the ten-year debt by about $1.6 trillion. This is mainly the result of extrapolated costs from the FY 2022 and FY 2023 appropriations bills, when no caps on discretionary spending led scorekeepers to update future baselines to assume future growth with inflation.² Conversely, President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act in June 2023, which put in place caps on discretionary spending for FY 2024 and 2025 and – along with other smaller measures – was estimated to reduce debt by $1.5 trillion over a decade based on extrapolated savings.³

In addition to signing $3.4 trillion of ten-year borrowing into law through legislation, President Biden also approved $1.2 trillion of new ten-year debt from the executive actions and regulations submitted by his administration. Most of this sum came from student loan actions, including $145 billion from student loan repayment pauses, $145 billion from targeted student debt cancellations, and $330 billion from the “SAVE” income-driven repayment plan, which is now on hold pending court actions. Student loan action costs would have been even higher had his first student debt cancellation plan not been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, or if his second attempt at broad-based cancellation had been finalized (it was withdrawn in the final weeks of his presidency). President Biden also approved roughly $230 billion of Medicaid-related executive actions, including, most significantly, a rule formalizing an upper limit on state-directed payments in Medicaid at the level of commercial insurance rates.

President Biden added another $200 billion to the debt by approving an update to the Thrifty Food Plan that substantially increased Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and $170 billion to the debt through a vehicle emissions rule that will increase the uptake of Electric Vehicle tax credits, among other effects. And finally, he reduced deficits by roughly $130 billion through changes to payments for Medicare Advantage plans and a temporary stay of the subsequently repealed Trump prescription drug rebate rule.

Importantly, it is unclear whether these changes will ultimately take effect. For example, the Trump Administration has already begun the process of withdrawing several rules put forward by the Biden Administration, and Congress is considering reversing others through the legislative process. Additionally, Congress has rescinded more of the IRA’s IRS funding, and appropriations levels for FY 2025 have differed from the caps specified in the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

1  CBO estimated that the Honoring Our PACT Act would increase deficits by $277 billion over a decade directly, while allowing lawmakers to shift an additional amount of existing discretionary costs to the mandatory side of the budget. Our estimate reflects the midpoint (plus interest) in the range of costs that lawmakers could shift, which was effectively codified in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.

2 Both the FY 2022 and 2023 appropriations laws’ impacts on baseline deficits would have been substantially smaller had they been scored against an updated CBO baseline that reflected actual inflation rather than projections – the bulk of the increases under both laws kept spending apace with the very high rate of inflation for those years.

3 Although not part of the legislation, the debt limit deal that included the FRA reportedly included a number of side deals associated with it that would erode about one-third of the scored savings. We only charged President Biden for these side deals to the extent that they were enacted in appropriations bills he signed into law.