Budget Resolution Should Provide a Plan for Realistic Debt Reduction

Lawmakers intend to pursue budget reconciliation legislation in the coming months, which requires passage of a concurrent budget resolution that includes reconciliation instructions in order to start this process (read about the whole process in our Reconciliation 101). Regardless of whether Congress proceeds with one or more reconciliation packages, Congress should use the process for its intended purpose and achieve meaningful deficit reduction.  

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

Our country’s fiscal situation is bad and getting worse, with the national debt on track to exceed its record as a share of the economy in just two years, interest costs exploding, and trust funds for some of the federal government’s largest programs on track to be insolvent within 11 years. It is long past time for policymakers to have a plan to get our debt under control. 

The budget resolution that Congress will write in the coming weeks should do just that. Budgets are meant to provide a blueprint for federal finances, but unfortunately they have more often been used recently as “shell” resolutions simply intended to allow for the fast-track reconciliation process to bypass the filibuster in the Senate. We need an actual, comprehensive budget resolution that makes clear Congress’s intentions for spending, revenue, deficit, and debt over the coming decade – and it should include reconciliation instructions to reduce deficits, as reconciliation is intended to do.  

Congress should adopt a budget that aims to achieve a reasonable fiscal goal, such as stabilizing the debt over the decade, which would require roughly $9 trillion savings – an aggressive but achievable goal. In order to achieve this, all options should remain on the table. There are trillions of dollars in potential savings from common-sense bipartisan options to executive action reversals to offsets within the tax code and more.  

Lawmakers need to steer clear of budgetary gimmicks that hide the debt impact of their proposals. This includes using a “current policy baseline” to hide the cost of extending temporary policies, heroic economic growth assumptions, promising future savings that may never materialize, failing to use official scorekeepers, and relying on offsets that may not be permanent to pay for permanent policies. This is a tremendous opportunity for this budget to restore fiscal responsibility and steward a process of deficit reduction in the coming months. 

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