One Big Beautiful Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, now, turning to an issue that has to be worked out in our U.S. Senate, is the challenge of having honest budget numbers for the conversation over the reconciliation bill.

Back in 1974, the Senate and House were alarmed over the growing deficits. They were microscopic compared to the type of deficits we have today, but still people said: Let's not get on that path of expanding the national debt. Let's create a real budgeting process where we lay out a vision at the front end so that the bills that are passed by the committees--the revenue bills and the policy bills--fit into that budget framework so we will have control over the result, whether it is a surplus that we want or whether we want to spend more and run up some deficit because, perhaps, it is a year in which the economy is dipping, and we need to provide some stimulus. But the point was a front-end budgeting process into which we could put the effects of all of these different bills in the course of a year.

So it was an act designed to bring planning for revenue and spending levels into a coherent framework by laying out a budget and holding committees accountable to that budget vision.

In this Budget Act, Congress created two significant tools for very different and separate purposes. One of them is section 312 of the Budget Act. Section 312 says that the Committee on the Budget will establish estimates of ``the levels of new budget authority, outlays, direct spending, new entitlement authority, and revenues for a fiscal year.'' So there is the framework.

And to clarify, for most of the work that is done, the committee depends on the Joint Committee on Taxation for revenue projections and depends on the Congressional Budget Office for the cost of programs.

But this section in 312 has also been interpreted to give the chair of the Budget Committee the authority to resolve complex scoring questions that come up or technical ambiguities that come up on particular programs for particular revenue measures during normal legislating.

I emphasize ``during normal legislating.'' It has nothing to do with reconciliation.

Now, Congress created a second tool that was specifically about reconciliation. It is presented in the Budget Act and for a very special purpose. This section, reconciliation, was to be a filibuster- free pathway in the Senate for one reason and one reason alone: decreasing the deficit.

And you can imagine: There is Robert Byrd, who is the champion of the filibuster, who wants everything to have to go through a supermajority vote. It was often used against civil rights bills but was often used in other ways as well. And he would not let go of that for any reason, except the special role of reducing the national deficit.

A hundred Senators said yes to that vision--all the Democrats, all the Republicans.

So we have in that act a section 313, affectionately known as the Byrd rule, that lays out some very specific details for how to handle that reconciliation process.

So we have section 312, normal budgeting, for nonreconciliation bills, and we have section 313 with special rules for reconciliation bills.

Now, why am I coming to the floor to make such a detailed examination of issues that we wouldn't normally, well, wrestle with in a public forum. Well, the answer is because there is a plan afoot to take this tool that was always used and framed for regular budgeting to give a bit of flexibility to the Budget Committee through the Budget chair to resolve complex technicalities or abnormalities--issues--on small issues in normal bills and apply it in a completely corrupted version to section 313, overruling the foundation for reconciliation. Two very different tools, two very different purposes, but taking one and applying it to the other destroys the integrity of the reconciliation process, and I am going to lay that out in some detail.

Section 312 allows the Budget chair to be a referee, to find bipartisan common ground to solve those ambiguities in the budgets-- but, again, never used in reconciliation because it wasn't intended for that purpose.

Now, if you are going to have a special process to reduce deficits, you have to agree to have honest numbers. So, therefore, the act created the Congressional Budget Office to give us those honest numbers on what programs cost.

And then you have honest integrity with numbers on revenue coming from the Joint Committee on Taxation.

So you have these two institutions and a commitment in section 313 to honest budgeting numbers. So we will quit fooling ourselves, and we will quit fooling the public because the goal was to reduce the deficit, and you can't reduce the deficit if you are lying about what new measures will cost, whether it be revenue measures or they be policy measures.

So it would completely defeat the purpose of reconciliation to simply have the Budget chair, who could resolve a technical ambiguity in a normal bill, be able to say: Well, that is such a power, I am going to transport it from a normal budget bill over to reconciliation. Instead of using honest numbers from CBO and from the Joint Committee on Taxation, I am going to just create my own hall of mirrors, my own smoke, and my own baseline to pretend that things don't cost what they really cost.

It is a complete obliteration of the responsibility for integrity in the reconciliation process, which, again, was designed only to decrease the deficit.

Now, there has been a bit of a journey for the House and Senate since 1974, and that foundation that this reconciliation process would only be used to reduce the deficit got blown up in 1996. My colleagues across the aisle decided that, well, they wanted to pass a big tax bill, and they knew they couldn't do it through regular order. So they repurposed a process designed to reduce the deficit and said it could also be used for a tax bill that increases the deficit.

Well, that was a painful blow to fiscal responsibility because each and every one of their tax bills has vastly increased the deficit.

But they retained two other things: a second pillar, that said, after 10 years, every title has to either be deficit-neutral or reduce the deficit--so after a 10-year frame--and that they would continue to use honest numbers.

OK. Well, so now we have another situation where we rely here on using reconciliation not for its original purpose, to decrease the deficit, but for a tax bill. But pillars 2 and 3 were still in place up until this moment: no deficits in any title after 10 years and using honest numbers.

But the chair of the Budget Committee is saying: I don't want to keep pillar 2 and 3. I don't want to keep pillar 2 that says everything after 10 years has to be deficit-neutral or deficit reduction; and I don't want to use honest numbers because it lets the world see how expensive this bill is and kind of destroys our reputation for fiscal responsibility. So we want to create some magic math, some false baseline, to pretend that the bill does not have a lot of deficit.

Well, this is a huge mistake, and I am just here to say: Let's not let this happen. Let's not destroy the second and third pillars. Let's not destroy the second pillar which says: no deficits after 10 years.

Let's not destroy the third pillar which says: We use honest numbers from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office.

There are two reasons that my colleague who chairs the Budget Committee wants to take this provision from section 312 for normal budgeting that gives some flexibility to the Budget chair and bring it over and create this new fake baseline so this bill doesn't look like it will run up the debt that it obviously runs up. One is that he wants to make the tax cuts permanent, meaning deficits will be run far beyond the 10-year period. And, second, he wants the American people to believe that this is not going to create huge, massive, additional deficits and debt.

Well, those are not good reasons. We should all work together to maintain the second and third pillars of no deficits after 10 years-- the third pillar that, in fact, we will use honest numbers and not lie to ourselves and not lie to the American people about the cost of a bill.

He calls this new, fake baseline ``current policy baseline.'' And part of the little twist is to say: Hey, the law says that a tax provision ends, but we will pretend that it doesn't say that--the law doesn't say that--and it just continues on forever. And since we are now pretending that the law was written differently than it was really written, it is really not a new provision that costs anything. Because a lot of these new extensions or new tax provisions cost because they reduce the revenues, we will just pretend they don't.

But you know it is that kind of pretending that got us into this trouble to begin with. That is what the 1974 bill was about. Let's quit lying to ourselves. Let's quit lying to the public. Let's quit pretending we are not creating deficits when we are. Let's have honest, honest budgeting.

So the irony is that you can even see how this philosophy fails even within the Republican bill, because if this philosophy that every bill or measure that the law says ends actually continues, then there would be no reason to have in the bill what my Republican colleagues have put in the bill, which is that they end a bunch of tax provisions in the middle of the 10-year period so they can say the bill costs less.

So the old laws that are going to expire, we pretend they continue. But the new laws that we are creating at this very moment, that end within the 10 years, we pretend they actually end.

You can see how phony this situation is, and we need to do better.

Now, let me just go through how modest the use of section 312, in general budgeting, was. The first is, it was always bipartisan. It was bipartisan in 2017. It was bipartisan in 2023 and 2024 and 2025. Each of these times, it was bipartisan.

But this new proposal is to use it in this partisan fashion. It is a complete deviation from a Budget chair working out a gnarly problem in order to be able to figure out how we should really resolve how this individual policy should be evaluated, and, instead, turn it into an instrument in which you fake the numbers and do it in a partisan way.

So that is not the only way that this would break protocol. The second is that each time it was used, it was used on a very narrow provision. It was routine--in 2017, on the Crime Victims Fund; on the Power Marketing Administrations; on the preventing of double counting of a dairy program; on adjustments to the Fiscal Responsibility Act. It was always on a very narrow provision, not creating a whole new baseline out of thin air in order to fake the numbers over deficits and debt.

One example in this is 2017, when Republican Chair Mike Enzi directed CBO to use the original current law baseline for the Crime Victims Fund, rather than a new baseline with updated numbers, because, essentially, if you have a baseline at the start of the year and then, a few months pass, the numbers change slightly. And if you keep inventing or having to use a new baseline that is changing just, like, small amounts, it makes no sense because they aren't significant changes.

So it was an issue to say: No. Let's go ahead and use the baseline from the start of the year rather than updating it every single time that every week goes by. So a narrow, very narrow, issue.

And, as I noted before, it was to resolve an ambiguity. Each time it has been used, it has been to resolve an ambiguity. But, in this case, it is to create ambiguity; it is to create confusion; it is to create smoke and mirrors; it is to create a phony baseline to lie to ourselves and to the public about what this bill costs, and that is just wrong.

Let me give you an example.

In 2000, a deal had been struck on how to score activities of the Power Marketing Administrations, but over the years, the Congressional Budget Office had started scoring the program differently from the 2000 arrangement. In 2023 and 2024, Senate Budget Chair Sheldon Whitehouse and House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington invoked section 312 to have the CBO remember and observe the original 2000 agreement. It was the example of section 312 being used to resolve a technical ambiguity.

Let's look at one other way that it has been used in the past.

It was never used on reconciliation. It was not used on reconciliation in 2017. It was not used when they addressed the Power Marketing Administrations. That was not in reconciliation. Preventing the double counting of a dairy program is not in reconciliation. Adjusting the Fiscal Responsibility Act was not in reconciliation.

This provision wasn't designed for reconciliation. Reconciliation has its own set of rules in section 313, and those rules say each provision--the word is ``provision''--in the proposed law is accounted for in terms of estimating accurately through these numbers from the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation what its real effect will be.

So that is the story, and I will give you an example.

In 2023, Senator Whitehouse and Representative Arrington again worked together to resolve an issue in the farm bill. The CBO was scoring the dairy program and reducing the costs of extending the program by $105 million over 10 years, but the CBO didn't include it in the new farm bill's baseline, meaning the Ag Committee has to pay for the program a second time out of the funding allocated to their committee. That didn't make any sense so they fixed it.

That is an example--very narrow, bipartisan--and we are talking small numbers.

Let's turn to those issues over small numbers. Well, they aren't so small when you think about this in terms of our normal trip to the grocery store--$73 million or less than $200 million. One case in the Fiscal Responsibility Act--again, in a bipartisan, specific provision-- is $2.8 billion. What is this bill about? What is this fake baseline being used to hide in this case? It is $37 trillion of additional debt.

Again, this is absolutely a crime against fiscal responsibility. It is blowing up the last two pillars from the 1974 Act: no additional debt or deficit past 10 years of any title; the honest use of numbers from the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation. It is taking a provision to allow the taking on of small ambiguities to be wrestled with in a bipartisan fashion and resolved--taking that flexibility--and using it in the wholesale destruction of responsible budgeting. So let's not do this.

Colleagues, the deficit now, annually, is sizable. It is about 6 percent of our gross domestic product. Remember the end of the Clinton administration? We were raising in revenue about 21 percent of GDP. We were spending about 21 percent. We were actually running a surplus. Now we are spending 6 percent more of GDP than we are bringing in as revenue. We are no longer bringing in 21 percent of GDP in revenue. We are bringing in 17 percent. We are no longer spending 21 percent. We are spending 23 percent.

This bill, by the way, will crank up that gap between revenue and spending even more as time passes. It is a pathway to not only destroying the current programs that my colleague from Massachusetts was talking about--16 million people losing healthcare, 4 million children going hungry to give tax breaks to billionaires. It is not only a pathway to destroy current programs, but it runs up debt to destroy the ability to provide fundamental programs in housing and healthcare and education for the next generation, and that is wrong.

That is why I say to you colleagues on both sides of the aisle: Let's be honest about the numbers. Let's not corrupt the process by bringing a measure that belongs in the regular budgeting world, not in the reconciliation world, in order to destroy reconciliation as a process that will not increase deficits after 10 years and will honestly convey the effect of each provision in the bill as to whether it raises revenue or spends money.

Preserve honest budgeting. Let's do that. It will serve us well. It will serve the Nation well.

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