WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump faces the challenge of convincing Republican senators, global investors, voters and even Elon Musk that he won’t bury the federal government in debt with his multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package.
The response so far from financial markets has been skeptical as Trump seems unable to trim deficits as promised.
“All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing — and the tax bill codifies that,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier.”
The White House has viciously lashed out at anyone who has voiced concern about the debt snowballing under Trump, even though it did exactly that in his first term after his 2017 tax cuts.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing Thursday by saying she wanted “to debunk some false claims” about his tax cuts.
Leavitt said the “blatantly wrong claim that the ‘One, Big, Beautiful Bill’ increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson piled onto Congress’ number crunchers on Sunday, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “The CBO sometimes gets projections correct, but they’re always off, every single time, when they project economic growth. They always underestimate the growth that will be brought about by tax cuts and reduction in regulations.”
But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together.
