Republicans are riding high after passing their continuing resolution to fund the government and their budgetary roadmap for reconciliation despite their tiny majority in the House.
But next steps on their “big, beautiful bill” will depend crucially on what the Senate Parliamentarian will allow in terms of deficit accounting.
In the face of opposition from some lawmakers in the House, Republicans in the Senate are sold on the idea of using the “policy baseline” to score their reconciliation package. The accounting method could allow as much as $5 trillion to be written out of the deficit effects of the tax cut and spending bill.
They’re also keen to use “dynamic scoring” in their projections, which forecasts economic growth resulting from the bill that would further offset deficit expansions on paper, though many in the tax world do not think these effects are significant.
The result could be a budgetary “Frankenstein creation,” said Brendan Duke, director of fiscal policy at the left-leaning nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in a Wednesday interview.
Taking liberties with Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act “could allow the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee to simply assert that the official score is quite literally whatever he says it is, allowing him to fabricate a score from thin air,” Duke wrote in a paper last year.
“Critically, the Senate parliamentarian has advised in the past that the budget chair does not have that authority,” he wrote.
— Tobias Burns
