A group of budget hawks said Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s plan to balance the federal budget was “a claim at utter and complete odds with fiscal reality and the policies he is promising.”
Trump said in his address to a joint session of Congress that he wanted to a balanced budget, which would be a historic accomplishment.
“In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: Balance the federal budget,” he said. “We are going to balance it.”
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said it good to hear the president acknowledge the problem, but unlikely he’d be able to accomplish the task.
“Troublingly, America’s fiscal imbalances have grown so large that balancing the budget is likely out of reach in the medium term,” she said. “It would take nearly $17 trillion in ten-year savings to balance the budget by 2035.”
The largest savings package in the past dozen years, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, saved $1.5 trillion over a decade, MacGuineas noted.
“Fiscal goals are more effective when they are aspirational, yes, but more importantly, reasonable and achievable as well,” she said. “With our national debt on course to reach its highest share of the economy we’ve ever seen, we urgently need solutions to match the rhetoric.”
She said a more reasonable goal – proposed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent – would bring the deficit down to 3% of gross domestic product, a measurement of economic output.
“This requires $7.5 trillion of savings over ten years, and while aggressive, it is doable if Congress starts immediately and scours all parts of the budget, including both spending and taxes,” MacGuineas said.
Republicans have all but ruled out tax increases other than tariffs. The House has proposed a $4.5 trillion bill that extends the tax cuts brokered during Trump’s first term in office.
The House proposal would allow $2.8 trillion in deficit increases through 2034. The Senate has proposed a fully offset $342 billion Senate bill that leaves the tax cuts for a later date.
In the past 50 years, the federal government has ended with a fiscal year-end budget surplus four times, most recently in 2001. Congress has run a deficit every year since then.
