Senate Republicans moved on Sunday to upend how the costs of tax cuts are counted, a change they are seeking as part of a broader attempt to expand what lawmakers can pass without a filibuster-proof majority.
The gambit concerns how long Republicans’ tax cuts can last. Typically, lawmakers cannot pass costly long-term policies through the Senate without bipartisan support. But Republicans want to lock in lower taxes permanently, and they are preparing to smash precedent to do so.
To pass their sprawling tax and health care bill, Republicans are using a legislative process called reconciliation that allows them to ignore Democratic opposition in the Senate and approve the bill with a simple majority of 51 votes, rather than the 60 typically needed to overcome a filibuster. But using reconciliation has long imposed additional rules on lawmakers, including that the legislation can only add to the deficit for 10 years. After a decade, a bill cannot create new costs.
That limitation has shaped American fiscal policy for a generation. Lawmakers in both parties have set programs that add to the deficit to expire within a decade rather than try to cover their cost in the long term.
This time around, Senate Republicans are instead invoking an alternative accounting method that wipes away the cost of extending tax cuts already in place. Republicans argue that the tax cuts they originally passed in 2017, which expire at the end of the year, should be baked into the country’s fiscal forecasts even though Congress has not yet actually renewed them. By that logic, the $3.8 trillion cost of extending the 2017 cuts is zero, and those cuts can be extended for decades even though reconciliation’s rules prohibit long-term deficit increases.
The entire Senate Republican bill relies on this view of the tax cuts’ costs. Without this accounting assumption, the legislation would run afoul of Senate rules and require Republicans to rework the entire 940-page project, which President Trump has demanded be ready for his signature by July 4.
The two parties disagree on whether altering accounting standards is allowed. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, took to the floor on Sunday to begin the process of pushing through the G.O.P. interpretation of the budget.
“This is an issue that I think we need to deal with right off the bat,” Mr. Thune said, arguing that Senate rules allow the chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, to decide how costs are accounted for. Presiding over the chamber was Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio, who affirmed Mr. Thune’s view.
Democrats quickly challenged that interpretation, calling for a vote that is expected later Sunday or early Monday to challenge Mr. Moreno’s ruling. They charged that the Republican strategy ultimately weakens the filibuster in the Senate and opens the door to Democrats, too, passing more expensive policies through the process in the future.
“We’re now operating in a world where the filibuster applies to Democrats but not to Republicans, and that’s simply unsustainable given the triage that’ll be required whenever the Trump era finally ends,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in a statement.
“It is fakery, the budget numbers are a fraud, but the deficits will be very real,” he added on the Senate floor.
As they have upended the Senate’s norms around the cost of legislation that can be passed along party lines, Republicans have avoided putting the issue directly to the chamber’s parliamentarian, who helps enforce Senate rules. Unlike the many other measures that are litigated with the parliamentarian ahead of the bill coming to the floor, Republicans and Democrats did not formally discuss the issue with her.
Given that many Republicans say they are hesitant to directly contradict the parliamentarian, such a discussion would have had very high stakes for the G.O.P., potentially requiring an overhaul of the bill. But Republicans say the parliamentarian’s view is not necessary, pointing to an obscure clause in budget law that they say blesses their tactic.
“I’m setting the numbers,” Mr. Graham said.
The Republican push has already changed the way Washington’s scorekeepers analyze the bill. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office provided two estimates for the legislation, one according to the Senate Republican method and one according to their typical rules.
The bill would reduce the debt by roughly $500 billion if the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts is ignored, the budget office said, but increase the debt by at least $3.3 trillion if that cost is accounted for.
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.
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