Karoline Leavitt said Donald Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ won’t add to the deficit. But it will.

As House Republicans continued their efforts to advance what President Donald Trump calls his "big, beautiful bill" of tax and spending cuts, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt played down the bill’s expected federal deficit impact.

At a May 19 press briefing, a reporter asked Leavitt, "Is the president OK with this bill adding to the deficit?"

Leavitt disagreed with the question’s premise. 

"This bill does not add to the deficit," she said. "In fact, according to the Council of Economic Advisors, this bill will save $1.6 trillion. … There's $1.6 trillion worth of savings in this bill. That's the largest savings for any legislation that has ever passed Capitol Hill in our nation's history."

A deficit is the annual amount by which spending exceeds revenues; the accumulation of all past annual deficits, minus any annual surpluses, is called the federal debt.

The bill is still being negotiated, so its potential deficit impact is a moving target. However, numerous independent analyses agree that the bill is on track to add significantly to the federal deficit. That’s because the bill’s tax cuts would reduce incoming federal revenue by more than it restricts spending.

Leavitt’s "$1.6 trillion worth of savings" appears to refer only to the bill’s proposed spending cuts  without factoring in the lost tax revenue that will increase the annual deficit and the federal government’s cumulative debt, experts said.

"Bottom line — because that is what matters — is that simple math of all the additions and subtractions equals nearly $3 trillion in additional debt" during the standard budget time frame of 10 years, said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group that tracks the federal budget.

The White House did not respond to inquiries for this article. 

Analyses of the bill show it increasing the deficit and adding to the debt

The reconciliation bill, as it is called, must pass the House and the Senate in identical form by simple majorities, then be signed by the president. So the measure’s provisions are subject to change, making any point-in-time analysis somewhat uncertain.

That said, no expert assessment has shown that the bill will add nothing to the deficit. 

Congress’ official scorekeepers — the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation — have analyzed parts of the bills but have not produced a unified figure for its deficit effect. But, building on CBO and JCT’s work, multiple organizations have compiled assessments of the bill’s potential deficit impact. 

These assessments show increased deficits from $3 trillion to $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

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The Penn-Wharton Budget Model at the University of Pennsylvania estimates that annual deficits will cumulatively increase by about $3.2 trillion over the next 10 years.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that’s hawkish on fiscal policy, has estimated that the bill will add about $3.3 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, increasing the cumulative federal debt to a record 125% of gross domestic product. The group says the added deficits would reach $5.2 trillion if certain temporary provisions in the bill are made permanent, such as an enhanced child tax credit and an end to taxes on tips and overtime. 

The ratings agency Moody’s recently calculated the fiscal impact of extending Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which accounts for much of the reconciliation legislation. Moody’s projected that an extension would add around $4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, not counting interest payments. The agency said the deficit increase was a factor in its decision to lower the United States’ credit rating earlier this month.

As for the $1.6 trillion in savings that Leavitt cited in the press briefing, experts said this figure aligns with the bill’s proposed spending cuts. But pointing to the spending cuts without acknowledging the bill’s other effects presents a partial picture, said Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the Tax Foundation, a center-right think tank.

The $1.6 trillion in savings "excludes the items that increase the deficit — $3.8 trillion from the tax package, $144 billion for military spending, and another $177 billion for homeland security and other changes," Watson said.

Our ruling

Leavitt said Trump’s tax and spending bill "does not add to the deficit."

Analyses of the bill and its deficit impact are based on legislation that is still under negotiation and is changing. But using preliminary information from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, multiple outside groups’ analyses project that the bill would increase deficits by $3 trillion to $4 trillion over the next decade.

We rate the statement False.