The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday that the broad Republican bill to cut taxes and slash some federal programs would add $2.4 trillion to the already soaring national debt over the next decade, in an analysis that was all but certain to inflame concerns that President Trump’s domestic agenda would lead to excessive government borrowing.
The C.B.O. estimate focused on the version of the bill that passed the House late last month, but the tally could change as Republicans in the Senate begin to put their imprint on the legislation. G.O.P. lawmakers there want to deepen some of the bill’s tax cuts, while others are pressing to pare back some its cuts to Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor, and clean-energy tax incentives.
Conservatives and Wall Street investors had already expressed grave concerns that the measure would swell federal deficits, and some Senate Republicans have said they cannot back the legislation in its current form for that reason. That could derail the bill’s progress, given that the party can afford to lose no more than three votes in the Senate if all Democrats vote against it.
The United States government currently has roughly $29 trillion in public debt, and C.B.O. had previously forecast that it would grow by roughly $21 trillion over the next decade, reaching nearly $50 trillion in 2034, as a growing share of Americans take advantage of government retirement support. With a roughly $3.8 trillion tax cut at its core, the Republican bill had long been expected to significantly add to that debt and make a precarious situation worse.
Hard-right lawmakers in the House demanded that the G.O.P. use its total control of Washington to also slash spending and contain the cost of the legislation. The cuts it included were ultimately significant, with changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act that the C.B.O. projected would save roughly $1 trillion over a decade while also resulting in 10.3 million Americans losing their health insurance.
But even with the bill’s cuts, which also include substantial reductions to food stamps, Republicans have fallen well short of their stated goal of covering the cost of the legislation and improving the nation’s fiscal standing.
That has drawn cries of protest from some in the party, highlighting a fundamental disconnect between fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party and Mr. Trump, who does not share their aversion to debt and has pledged not to pursue the kind of structural changes that would rein it in.
That divide became clear this week as the president attacked Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the Republicans opposing the bill because of its cost. Elon Musk, the billionaire technology executive who had led Mr. Trump’s effort to slash government spending, echoed Mr. Paul’s concerns, blasting the legislation as an “abomination” that would “burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”
To defend the measure, some Republicans and White House aides have taken to attacking the C.B.O. as politically motivated and unreliable, though several other nonpartisan, independent groups have also concluded the bill would add significantly the debt.
Some administration officials have also trotted out a series of other familiar arguments to discount concerns about the bill’s effects on the debt. Chief among them is that the tax cuts would help the economy grow, thus paying for themselves.
Under this thinking, the tax cuts help people make more money and therefore pay more in taxes, even if their tax rates are lower. The C.B.O. analysis released Wednesday did not explore the possible economic effects of the legislation, but a previous estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation, another nonpartisan office, showed that the tax cuts would generate almost no additional economic growth.
The C.B.O. analysis also may not actually account for the full costs of the tax cuts included in the bill. In the House version, several of the cuts — including Mr. Trump’s campaign pledges to not tax tips and overtime pay — would last for only a few years. Those cuts would become far more costly if, as almost always happens with major tax reductions, they were eventually extended. A J.C.T. analysis requested by Democrats found that extending both measures would add an additional $1.7 trillion in debt.
The ultimate judge of America’s debt problem is Wall Street. Global investors have long been happy to keep lending the government money, even as Congress increased spending and cut taxes. But in recent weeks, some analysts have started to question whether investor appetite for American debt could start to wane, a change that could raise borrowing costs across the economy, including for the government itself.
Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the United States last month, the last of the major rating firms to cast some doubt on the country’s ability to pay its bills.
Margot Sanger-Katz contributed reporting.
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.
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