How a GOP accounting maneuver hides $3.8 trillion in red ink from Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

As Senate Republicans barrel toward votes as soon as this weekend on President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, they are using a controversial budget maneuver to hide $3.8 trillion in red ink.

This Senate-preferred accounting approach is known as using a “current policy baseline” and takes the stance that extending current tax rates should be counted as having zero cost even if they are set to expire.

What doesn’t change is the underlying fact that those changes are projected to add trillions to the national debt if they become law.

The approach is being derided as an “egregious budget gimmick” and upends decades of accounting practices with trillions in economic consequences.

This bit of Washington arcana was front and center this past week after the Joint Committee on Taxation analyzed the tax provisions in the bill using this “current policy” approach and found a total cost of about $442 billion in the coming decade.

But after economists untangled the math — and put things into the more comprehensive “current law” framework — the true impact on the national debt was shown to be nearly 10 times higher at about $4.2 trillion.

The focus comes as GOP senators struggle to overcome internal disagreements on the price tag as well as other provisions.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune and President Trump are continuing to push for votes on the package as soon as possible, with the president posting Friday that Senators would be “working all weekend” even as the timing has continually shifted after new complications emerged and compromises on other issues have remained elusive.

As for the price tag, Republicans leaders have tried with mixed success to end debate on that question by citing the “current policy” total and saying it is more realistic.

“Extending the Trump tax cuts prevents a $4 trillion tax increase — this is not a change in current tax policy or tax revenue,” Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo said in a recent statement. “This score more accurately reflects reality by measuring the effects of tax policy changes relative to the status quo.”

But the maneuver has been pilloried by economists.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget this week called the approach “an egregious budget gimmick” that could have the larger effect of allowing trillions in new government borrowing in the years ahead.

Andrew Lautz of the Bipartisan Policy Center has detailed how the method changed the score on a range of key tax issues in the bill.