CRFB Reacts to Senate Proposed Budget

The Senate Budget Committee released a draft amendment to the House’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 budget resolution today, which the Senate intends to adopt as a concurrent budget resolution. The draft amendment includes reconciliation instructions that would likely allow up to $5.8 trillion in additional primary deficits through 2034. Specifically, it includes up to $2,021 billion of deficit-increasing instructions, at least $4 billion of deficit reduction instructions, and the implicit inclusion of $3.8 trillion of tax cut extensions by adopting a ‘current policy’ baseline.

If borrowing increases by as much as allowed under the reconciliation legislation, we estimate it would double the growth of debt as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with debt-to-GDP reaching 134 percent by 2034 and 211 percent of GDP by 2055, compared with 117 percent and 156 percent, respectively, under current law projections.  

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

After the arduous process of putting together the House budget resolution – which, despite the $2 trillion of spending cuts it promises, would still allow $2.8 trillion of new ten-year borrowing – the Senate is proposing to completely throw away any semblance of fiscal responsibility by setting the stage for more than twice as much new debt.

This budget – and the potential use of current policy to hide $3.8 trillion of tax cuts – makes a mockery out of the reconciliation process. It completely forgoes the hard work of concrete savings proposals by giving a nominal $4 billion floor; it abandons any notion of recognizing the fiscal impact of extending the tax cuts; and it allows a massive $1.5 trillion of new tax cuts on top of potentially more than $500 billion of new spending. It isn’t really a budget – it’s a blueprint for miring us in even more debt.

Reconciliation should reduce deficits. This budget would set the stage for the largest deficit increase ever – three times as large as the American Rescue Plan, four times larger than the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and 75 percent larger than all bipartisan COVID relief combined. And it doesn’t even attempt to match up its savings with the House’s hard-fought $2 trillion.  

It's beyond comprehension that lawmakers would look at our fiscal situation today, with debt approaching record levels and interest costs heading past $1 trillion annually, and decide that we should pile on more debt. And it’s maybe even more troubling that they are looking at ignoring the official scorekeepers to set their own budget numbers – which could essentially render the rules of reconciliation, and perhaps all budget enforcement for that matter, meaningless.

This budget is a farce and it should be a non-starter. But more than that, it should be a loud alarm bell to fiscal hawks and future generations that their interests are not only being ignored, but fully undermined. And our long-term prosperity is being put in danger. 

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