Broken congressional promises and bipartisan hypocrisy in America’s debt crisis
On July 1, 2025, Senate Republicans passed one of the most disastrous pieces of fiscal legislation in recent American history. Hailed as the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill,’ the legislation prompted Republicans to cheer over what Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) described as “taking away health care from around 17 million people…and giving huge tax breaks to a handful of billionaires.” While these first two reasons are legitimate objections to the bill, a third reason compels dire attention: the implosion of the national debt. Passed three days before the anniversary of our nation’s founding, the bill spat on our nation’s principles of congressional fiscal responsibility. As Senator Warren correctly warned, the administration “cheered over running up the national debt by another three and a half trillion dollars.” However, Warren’s criticism of the bill’s contributions to our debt crisis lacks credibility. She comes from a system of Washington bureaucrats who have colluded in irresponsible spending at the expense of the American people. Overall, few lawmakers on either side of the aisle have been serious about debt in crafting their fiscal policy, so the time has come for the American people to hold them accountable for their actions.
Despite Democratic complaints that the Big, Beautiful Bill uniquely exacerbates the national debt, they, too, are responsible for the country’s debt problem. Back in 2022, Democratic congressional leaders worked to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, a misnomer better termed the ‘Inflation Promotion Act.’ These representatives point to a common consensus by macroeconomic policy analysts, who have generally projected that the act will alleviate inflation and debt issues. These experts tout the long-term effects of the bill outlined by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which, taken together, project a $238 billion deficit reduction from the bill. However, this consensus has missed the mark on the key context surrounding the CBO’s estimates. First, it conveniently omits the negative short-term effects of the bill, which would increase fiscal spending by $110 billion and the deficit by nearly $60 billion, effectively continuing to increase the federal government’s borrowing. This bill also came on the heels of another costly COVID-19 bill, the American Rescue and Progress Act (ARPA), which London School of Economics researchers estimated would also pile onto the debt. Secondly, even if we accept the premise of assessing the bill’s long-term effects as determinative of its efficacy, arguments that the bill will curtail debt still fail to hold water. Most significantly, the CBO scoring did not account for the bill’s unlimited cap on clean energy tax credits. If exceeding projections, these corporate energy tax credits could lead to an unexpected shortfall in revenue, potentially causing original estimates to be off by an order of magnitude. While policymakers can feel great about vomiting the words “clean energy tax credit,” the policy, in reality, writes a check to corporations while adding uncertainty to the bill’s effects on the national debt.
However, Republicans, eager to call out Democrats for passing the IRA several years ago, have now flipped the script with the passage of the Big, Beautiful Bill, better termed the ‘Big, Ugly Bill.’ The same Republicans, who had touted CBO data on the Inflation Reduction Act’s effects on increasing the deficit, now made a series of baseless attacks against the organization. Even though the CBO has estimated the bill will add $3.4 trillion to the national deficit, Republicans repeatedly denied the bill’s harmful impacts. Calling the CBO’s estimates fake, some Republicans have tried to twist the bill’s new effects with magical explanations without a sound economic basis. Rep. Young Kim (R-CA) claimed, “If you explain it the right way, [Trump’s law] actually is intended to reduce the deficit over time. We can’t do it overnight, but the fact [is] that we’re doing it incrementally.” That’s literally the equivalent of a student projecting a grade increase in a course, only to proceed by attending a weekend party before a test and flunking it. It’s easy to talk about lofty, long-term goals when you’re failing in the short term, right?
With all this talk about the national debt, why should we even be concerned about this problem in the first place? Congress cannot simply borrow indefinitely, and continued borrowing is unsustainable. As our debt builds up, interest rates will rise, crowding out crucial domestic spending on education and healthcare, two areas of great concern for Democrats who have recently called out the Big, Beautiful Bill. Furthermore, an analysis by the Yale Budget Lab finds that increased interest rates will increase foreign investors’ perceived risk in investing in the US dollar. As a result of increased fear of foreign investors, interest will continue to rise. If unguarded, this trajectory could bring the more worrying long-term effect of the loss of the US dollar as the hegemonic global currency. Further arbitrary raises on the debt ceiling will do little to nothing to alleviate the problem, only kicking the can down the road with the inevitable default that will plunge the American economy into chaos. If lawmakers allow the debt to implode, the disaster would come at the cost of ordinary, working-class Americans, whose healthcare and basic benefits can no longer be paid by the federal government.
In light of the possibility of such a disastrous future, it is now on the shoulders of citizens to hold their elected officials accountable for piling onto their already imploding debt. Enough is enough. When leaders in both major political parties have consistently ignored the problem and alluded to vague, long-term fixes to the debt, citizens must know that their very livelihood is at stake. The time has come, then, to vote out any elected representatives who continue to contribute to the problem.
