By Lawrence Wilson
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase the U.S. deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said today, revising its previous calculations based on the final content of the bill.
The nonpartisan group, which provides financial information to Congress, estimated that the original House version of the bill would increase the deficit by $2.8 trillion from 2025 through 2034.
When the Senate amended the House version, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revised its estimate to $3.3 trillion on June 29.
The bill will decrease spending by $1.1 trillion, the CBO said, but will also decrease revenue by $4.5 trillion.
President Donald Trump signed the legislation on July 4, seeing it as critical to implementing his second-term agenda.
Democrats criticized the legislation for making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent. The cuts were set to expire at the end of this year.
House Democrats say they’re focused on fixing a broken system to make life more affordable for everyday Americans. “The one big ugly bill instead prioritizes massive tax breaks for billionaires,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote on social media on July 21.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote on social media on July 20: “Senate Republicans love to talk about the fiscal responsibility, but they just added $4 TRILLION to the debt with their Big, Ugly Betrayal.”
Republicans have pointed out that most Americans would have seen a tax increase if the cuts had been allowed to expire.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) has critiqued the accuracy of CBO projections, saying the office has left out important information from its analyses in the past.
“They’ve always ignored what tax cuts will do to grow the American economy,” Scalise said on June 4. Referring to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which implemented the Trump tax cuts in 2017, Scalise said: “The CBO said it would cost a decrease in revenue to the tune of one and a half trillion dollars … they were off by more than one and a half trillion dollars.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said she was not concerned about projected increases in the deficit.
“It was the largest tax cut for middle and working class families in our nation’s history, and the President wants to see this country get our fiscal house in order. That’s why this was a fiscally responsible bill,” Leavitt told reporters on July 21.
A report from the president’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated that if the cuts expired, the average taxpayer would see a 22 percent increase in taxes, totaling $4 trillion, according to a White House press release.
Republicans have said that the CBO projections have not taken into account the negative effect on the economy that would have resulted from allowing the tax increases to go into effect, nor the benefits of keeping taxes lower.
The CBO analysis shows an initial $21 billion reduction in the deficit for 2025. However, the deficit is expected to increase rapidly over the next two years, with the largest increase, more than $600 billion, coming in 2027.
Meanwhile, revenue from increased tariffs produced a budget surplus of $27 billion in June, according to data from the Treasury Department.
That revenue helped to lessen the year-to-date deficit of $1.34 trillion, a 1 percent improvement over last year. The federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
