At the top of the House Budget Committee website, there is a 14-digit clock, ticking away at all hours of the day and night.
Instead of counting down, however, this clock is moving upward from $36 trillion. And even if it’s not unwinding toward zero, to the Hollywood moment when the time bomb will explode, the point is the same: The clock is marching toward calamity.
These debt clocks, once a digital staple of the Tea Party Republicans who took over Congress in 2010, are mostly gone from lawmaker websites. Where they once hung outside of GOP congressional offices, displaying numbers like $15 trillion near the end of Barack Obama’s first term, there are now just more bureaucratic white walls.
But Republicans on the House Budget Committee don’t want you to forget about our crushing fiscal situation. That is, of course, unless the debt-inducing item in question is tax cuts.
For tax cuts, Republicans have a staggering, special talent for forgetting about the debt clock. And if you question even the most conservative Republicans about the wisdom of adopting a budget that statutorily promises to add even more debt — in the name of tax cuts — GOP lawmakers defend it unflinchingly.
“What’s the alternative?” Rep. Ralph Norman said after the committee adopted its deficit-busting, $4-trillion-debt-limit-increasing budget. “Is it perfect? No. But it’s a move in the right direction when you look at the alternative.”
“The Senate?” Norman continued. “When have they ever had anything fiscally conservative? They haven’t.”
A day before the vote, Norman and other Freedom Caucus members on the Budget Committee told reporters they were struggling to support such an expensive blueprint for reconciliation. But hours later, the budget resolution was voted out of committee with unanimous Republican support.
Reps. Andrew Clyde, Ben Cline, Chip Roy and Norman — each having expressed comfort opposing Speaker Mike Johnson’s spending bills in the name of not adding to the deficit — delivered a multitrillion funding top line out of the committee.
In exchange for their support, Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington had to make a concession. He had to adopt an amendment that would essentially tie how much Republicans can spend on tax cuts with how much Republicans cut from entitlements, though there will still be a gap. The tax cuts are due to lower revenue by $4.5 trillion over the next decade; the entitlement cuts are supposed to total $2 trillion.
Which is to say, once again, Republicans are sacrificing their debt concerns at the altar of tax cuts.
And as much as some hard-liners maintain that adding trillions to the debt was still a major concern — “There’s a ton of people who care about that,” Roy told NOTUS — other Republicans acknowledged there was a hierarchy, and tax cuts seemed to sit above the debt.
“It’s what President Trump has asked for,” Clyde said last week, referring to the $4 trillion debt ceiling raise. “And I think it will help him accomplish his agenda.”
Right before the vote, as lawmakers and aides gathered in a space just outside of the committee room, one Republican said the eye-popping dollar amount shouldn’t even be a part of the discussion.
“Not even talking about numbers right now,” Rep. Jack Bergman said before the vote. “We’ve got other things to do.”
The House isn’t alone in disregarding the deficit. The Senate is attempting its own reconciliation bill, and even without budget-busting tax cuts in their bill, Senate Republicans plan to spend plenty of money.
After senators met last Tuesday with Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham told reporters that the chamber would move forward with a roughly $350 billion plan that would aid energy and defense while replenishing the resources of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
By pushing back tax cuts, the Senate is pushing back what would be the most costly piece of Trump’s legislative priorities. His landmark policy win during his first administration, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, added an estimated $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion to the debt over 10 years. An extension of those cuts, which Republican lawmakers consider essential to avoid economic regression, could cost $4.2 trillion between 2026 and 2035.
A figure that high has some Republicans doing verbal gymnastics, as they try to balance fiscal responsibility with support for Trump’s tax-slashing agenda.
One way to do that? Just refuse to acknowledge the deficit impact of tax cuts.
Traditionally, Republicans have insisted that tax cuts basically pay for themselves with economic growth, even though nonpartisan analyses consistently show that’s not the case. (A typical Republican counter is that, if overall revenue goes up in the year following a tax cut, like it did in 2018 after Trump’s tax overhaul, that means the bill paid for itself — even if that’s not how revenue baselines work.)
Arrington himself has advocated for not relying exclusively on the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the costs of his budget, arguing that Republicans should instead rely on Republican-friendly think tanks to score the legislation.
And last year, Sen. Mike Crapo began questioning whether the costly projections of a tax extension were even relevant to conversations about the legislation.
From Crapo’s perspective, the $4.2 trillion projection is using an old baseline that always assumed taxes would bounce back to the pre-Tax Cuts and Jobs Act rates. He believes projections should be based on the current enacted policy, which would write off the added cost of an extension.
“The revenue to the federal Treasury is about 17.3% of GDP right now. If we do nothing but extend the act, revenue next year will be actually a little higher,” Crapo said last week. “So where is the increase in the deficit?”
“It’s a mathematical calculation based on assumptions that we’re saying are invalid assumptions,” Crapo added.
For Crapo and some other GOP senators, the theoretical costs of tax cuts will never fully include the overall benefits that they provide by boosting economic activity, a longstanding Republican anti-tax argument.
Tax cuts have yet to prove they can pay for themselves, but they’re a proven way to drive up the debt. During the Bush tax cuts, the Treasury Department projected that the cuts would pay for less than 10% of the long-term costs. The cuts added a projected $5.6 trillion to the national debt.
For Trump’s first administration cuts, the numbers were even uglier. They offset, at most, 5% of the revenue lost to the cuts, while struggling to definitively benefit the working class.
But the debate over whether tax cuts should really count toward blowing up government debt just underscores the larger point: Republicans are comfortable adding debt if it’s for tax cuts.
The other point is that, with Trump in office, some GOP concerns about debt seemed to disappear with Joe Biden’s presidency.
After riding Trump’s populist coattails to majorities in the House and Senate, most Republicans have gotten on board with the president’s tax agenda, which includes “no tax on tips,” an even lower corporate tax rate and an extension of the individual tax brackets Republicans approved in 2017.
Meanwhile, Trump insists that Republicans won’t be cutting entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid to offset tax cuts.
“Medicare, Medicaid — none of that stuff is going to be touched,” Trump said Tuesday night during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity.
If that’s true, there’s hardly any way to balance out the cuts, and that means Republicans intend to pay for the tax cuts by issuing even more debt.
As one senior GOP aide said, the conference just doesn’t care about the deficit as much as they once did. Where populism was once a wing of the GOP a year ago, with Trump as president, it’s closer to the full bird.
Of course, there are still some fiscal hawks.
In the House, Rep. Tim Burchett texted NOTUS that he was “very uncomfortable” with the House budget and wouldn’t currently support it on the floor. In the Senate, Rand Paul has publicly expressed frustration with his chamber’s plan to spend billions on border security. And Sen. Rick Scott has insisted that each penny be paid for, hoping to avoid the debt ceiling raise that Trump has requested.
“I don’t think that there’s an appetite for that over here,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis said about ballooning the deficit, admitting that there’s “an extremely large gap” between what the Department of Government Efficiency is cutting and potentially trillions in legislative costs.
She said that she, at least, wouldn’t be comfortable with the House bill.
“I’m willing to take a machete to some things that other people would prefer a scalpel,” Lummis said.
Cutting has long been key to the conservative game plan. But the question is whether Republicans will acknowledge that tax cuts also have a negative impact on the debt — and whether they plan to rein in Trump’s tax plans at all.
“President Trump has got some things that we want to make sure are in there,” Rep. Barry Moore said. “So it’s gonna be a balancing act, but we’ll see how it goes.”
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.