The One Big Beautiful Bill Republicans just jammed through Congress represents a $4 trillion fraud foisted on the American people. Even though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts, the core of the legislation, will add almost $4 trillion to the federal debt including interest, Republicans claim it cuts the deficit. Welcome to Washington’s new math.

This deception couldn’t come at a worse time for America’s debt. Our government’s borrowing has already surged to a dangerously high $36 trillion, and this year’s deficit is projected to increase debt almost $2 trillion. The last thing America needs is another multitrillion-dollar tax cut vastly tilted toward the wealthy, especially one that adds trillions in debt and slashes support for society’s most vulnerable. Yet if Republicans want to force such damaging policies onto the country, they should at least admit it.

Beyond the mounting debt, there are many other destructive policies in the new law. It drains resources from lower- and middle-income Americans by cutting health care for up to 17 million Americans, cutting student loans and reducing food assistance for the hungry— while showering fresh tax breaks on billionaires and millionaires. According to the Penn-Wharton model, the top 10% of the income distribution receives about 80% of the total value of the legislation. The measure also guts investment in clean energy at a moment when climate disruption is not only real but also accelerating.

There are two reasons Congress is trying to fool us about the cost. First, Republican leaders often masquerade as deficit hawks. Senate Republican Leader John Thune, who led the congressional drive to pass the bill, warned in 2023: “ The size of our national debt is going to crush our economy.” In 2016, Donald Trump even vowed to eliminate the national debt by 2024— only to increase it by nearly $8 trillion during his term. By hiding the true cost of this bill, Republican lawmakers preserve the illusion that they are fiscal conservatives even as they drive the debt ever higher.

Second, the deception allows them to evade a key congressional rule. Under the rule, any tax cut that adds to the deficit beyond a decade must be offset or else it is not permitted in the Senate. If the bill’s actual cost were disclosed, the rule would block it. So they resort to fiction.

The trick is remarkably bold. When the Trump tax cuts passed in 2017, most were set to expire in 2025 to reduce their projected 10-year cost. Now, Republicans have made the expiring tax cuts permanent — but instead of acknowledging they would expire unless extended, they’re pretending the cuts are already permanent. That allows them to claim the extension is free.

Imagine signing up for a one-month Netflix trial. When the month ends, you extend the subscription indefinitely — but insist it’s free because you already paid once. That’s the bizarre logic behind this scam.

Even some Republicans are embarrassed. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas has dismissed the maneuver as “fairy dust.” Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona went further, likening it to fraud a nd asking, “Am I giving you enough inflammatory language?”

The consequences of this debt explosion are not theoretical — they hurt working Americans. Growing debt pushes prices higher at a time when inflation is already too high. It drives up interest rates for people paying off credit card debt, families trying to buy homes or cars, and small businesses looking to expand. It siphons off trillions in taxpayer money to pay interest to bondholders — money that could otherwise fund education, health care or defense. And it makes our country more vulnerable to foreign adversaries such as China, which owns almost $1 trillion of U.S. debt, and it could wreak havoc on our economy by unloading it.

While Democrats and Republicans blame each other for the fiscal mess, the truth is both parties are responsible. Democrats have often overreached on domestic spending. Republicans have led the charge for repeated rounds of unfunded tax cuts.

The time is long overdue for Washington, D.C., to stop pointing fingers and to start reducing the debt. I know bipartisan solutions are possible because I worked on the last one, which produced four straight years of budget surpluses. But before members of Congress can fix the problem, they must stop misleading the American people about the cost of bills they pass.

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Thomas Kahn is a distinguished faculty fellow at American University. He served as the Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee from 1997 to 2016.

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