TIME FOR THE FUN TO BEGIN? What do you call a three-week sprint that potentially never gets out of the starting blocks?
That’s one of the questions facing congressional Republicans starting this week, after both the House and the Senate return to Washington and look to make real progress on a fiscal package that includes tax cuts, border security funding and other of President Donald Trump’s priorities.
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SETTING THE STAGE: Senate Republicans are supposed to ramp up informal meetings with the parliamentarian about using a current policy baseline in the reconciliation process, which would allow the GOP to assume it costs nothing to extend the temporary provisions from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and to be more expansive in their tax-cut ambitions.
But a new CBO report released on Friday raised new questions about whether the deficit hawks among Republicans would go along with that approach, which key Senate Republicans have suggested is a must-have for them.
The new analysis from the budget scorekeeper, requested by Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), found that keeping the expiring portions of the 2017 tax law without offsetting the costs would cause the federal debt to skyrocket — with the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio potentially to exceed 200 percent by 2047, and to reach 250 percent in three decades.
Deficit hawk groups, who have been urging Republicans to use the traditional current law baseline, quickly brandished the new CBO report. (Schweikert, you might recall, has basically suggested that Republicans would be frauds if they used current policy for this tax bill.)
“It’s intellectually a fraud. It is an intellectual fraud to say, ‘Let’s ignore the actual law and let’s just keep doing what we’re doing because it’s convenient,’”
Congressman David Schweikert [AZ-01], per TaxNotes Doug Sword, 02/05/2025
