By Alexis Simendinger & Kristina Karisch
The nation’s rising debt, barely more than a talking point in the Capitol in recent years, suddenly poses an ominous risk to President Trump’s sprawling legislative agenda.
Republican debate in Washington about deficits, debt and lower taxes took a new turn on Wednesday after the Congressional Budget Office released its finding that the mammoth House bill backed by Trump and now pending in the Senate would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over a decade.
Some Senate Republicans insist they cannot support a bill that explodes the debt, which currently totals nearly $37 trillion. Others balk at spending reductions that impact Medicaid and food assistance for the poor to pay for GOP-favored tax cuts. Such legislation, if enacted, would raise annual deficits and pile up levels of debt that, on paper, at least, swallow America’s economic output and drag down the economy, according to fiscal hawks and Wall Street investors.
Nonpartisan budget experts, examining the House-passed version of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” have yet to gauge what the Senate has in mind for its own version of legislation this summer.
Some Republicans are trying to discredit economists and budget experts who warn that Trump’s agenda would inflate the debt by trillions of dollars over nine or 10 years, while others are rattled by the potential election risks of failure to deliver a measure Trump can sign.
Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) told reporters as he departed a White House meeting among Trump and GOP leaders on Wednesday that assertions the bill would increase deficits are “absolutely wrong.”
The self-imposed Senate legislative deadline is a month away, on July 4, and the clamor to cut federal spending more deeply to trim the long-term budgetary costs of tax cuts shifted lawmakers’ conversation on Wednesday to Medicare, a program Trump promised voters he would not touch. “I won’t do it,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in December.
Some Senate Republicans make a distinction between cutting benefit payments and what they call Medicare “waste, fraud and abuse.”
Complicating the endeavor is a GOP plan to use a budget reconciliation procedure that relies solely on Republican votes to simultaneously allow up to $4 trillion in borrowing to cover existing U.S. obligations. The Treasury Department wants Congress to raise the debt limit before August or September, but Trump on Wednesday called for the statutory limit to be abolished altogether, throwing in with progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who also wants to revoke it. The president’s newest debt ceiling argument: “It is too devastating to be put in the hands of political people that may want to use it despite the horrendous effect.”