Republican lawmakers pledged that their 2025 tax cuts would pay for themselves. But more than a year after the law was enacted, the federal deficit is growing — by roughly $2 trillion per year — and official projections show the legislation adding trillions more to the national debt.
Now, confronted with a $40 trillion federal debt and a bill falling well short of their economic growth expectations, those same Republicans are offering a series of excuses.
Government shutdowns slowed economic growth, House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, told MS NOW. (“There were multiple shutdowns that hurt our prospects for growth,” Arrington said.)
And the Iran war has not helped. (“That has definitely put a wrinkle in it,” he said.)
And Congress’ official scorekeepers — who say the law will add roughly $4 trillion to the debt over the next decade — are using faulty math, he said. (Congressional Budget Office experts “use old models,” and Joint Committee on Taxation officials “don’t do a good job.”)
Excuses aside, Republican lawmakers acknowledge the country’s finances are in bad shape. Some even said drastic action, including changes to Medicare and Social Security, would be required.
“We’re doing good things,” Arrington told MS NOW. “We’re doing things that we need to continue to do that are making a difference. But at the end of the day, if you don’t touch the big entitlements, and you don’t do it on a bipartisan basis — which is the only politically viable route — I worry for the prospects of our country.”
The two biggest entitlement programs face shortfalls in the early 2030s.
But on June 27, 2025, shortly before the tax cuts were enacted, Arrington outlined some straightforward promises in a discussion with the conservative Republican Study Committee.
“We’re going to do this in a fiscally responsible way,” Arrington said at the time. “We’re not going to add to the deficit and, in fact, we’re going to bring the indebtedness down.”
Over the past year, however, Arrington’s rhetoric about the 2025 tax law has shifted from bold promises that it would reduce the deficit to tenuous explanations as to why it has not.
Before lawmakers ever voted on the reconciliation bill, known colloquially on Capitol Hill as the One Big Beautiful Bill, the CBO and JCT projected that the measure would add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.
And despite the GOP promises that their tax cuts would magically pay for themselves through new economic activity, a follow-up from the CBO earlier this year showed an even higher cost for the legislation: $4.7 trillion over the next decade, after accounting for increased interest payments and less-than-expected economic growth.
But the government’s official budgetary scorekeepers are not alone.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated the law would add $3.6 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Even the right-leaning Tax Foundation estimated the GOP legislation would add $4.1 trillion during that span.
The fiscal problem, of course, extends beyond the tax law itself.
The federal government racked up a $2 trillion deficit in the first 11 months of fiscal 2026, almost the same figure as the same span in the previous year, according to the CBO.
House Republicans partly based their budget math on the expectation that the U.S. economy would grow 2.6% per year in the long run, nearly a full point above the 1.8% benchmark in CBO projections.
Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., who hopes to succeed the retiring Arrington as chair of the House Budget Committee, still holds out hope that the bill will drive enough economic growth to pay for itself, though he acknowledged the growing debt is a major problem.
“If we see some of the economic growth projections that we projected in that bill, that bill will pay for itself,” Smucker told MS NOW. “But, like, we absolutely need to get to changing the trajectory, and so we need to get serious about changing. You’re seeing the flashing red signs in the bond market.”
Smucker said there will have to be a bipartisan deal on Social Security solvency, probably including an increase in the limit on taxable income, a phased-in increase in the retirement age and means-testing to ensure funds are directed to lower earners.
“Seventy-five percent of our budget is on autopilot, and it’s basically the major programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,” Smucker told MS NOW. “And so the challenge here is to find a way to make good on the promises to people who have been paying into the system, but also recognizing that we have a serious math problem.”
Other Republicans have exhibited a similar rhetorical shift, seeking new explanations after initially promising the bill would pay for itself.
Shortly after the tax law was enacted, Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said the reconciliation measure would be “deficit-neutral at the worst.”
“This is a key thing for us, that we are not going to grow the deficit, and according to these numbers, we will not be growing the deficit,” Burlison said in a YouTube explanation of the bill, pointing to projections of additional economic growth, which would make up for lost revenue.
Now, Burlison acknowledges the legislation itself is not bringing down the debt. But he argues that conservatives also pursued cost-saving measures through executive action.
“When you add that into the matrix, I think it — pretty much — it pays for itself,” Burlison told MS NOW.
Congressional scorekeepers “can only score what was in the bill, not what was discussed or what was negotiated in executive action,” Burlison said.
Still, lawmakers will have to address the deficit — at least by continuing to raise the debt ceiling, which they set at $41.1 trillion last year.
President Donald Trump called on Republican lawmakers in July to address the debt ceiling, ahead of a deadline expected next year.
Republicans are not thrilled at the prospect of more debt-limit votes, particularly after they just hiked it by $5 trillion as part of their 2025 tax law. But Burlison said Republicans will simply have to try to reduce borrowing gradually.
“We weren’t able to reduce the deficit, right?” Burlison said. “So we have to continue to fight to reduce it, and you know, unwinding a deficit of $2 trillion isn’t going to happen overnight. But we’re slowly chipping away at it. And we’re doing so with criticism from, like, your news agency. Every time we make any kind of spending reductions, you know, left news organizations are the first ones to scream that we’re harming the American people in some way.”
(In an effort to offset some of the costs of their tax cuts, Republicans cut more than $1 trillion of spending over the next decade from Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other health-related programs that mostly benefited the poorest Americans. Meanwhile, approximately $1 trillion of the cost of the bill is going to the richest 1%, according to the Center for American Progress.)
Still, Republicans maintain that their tax cuts were the right decision.
Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kan., a Ways and Means Committee member, called the tax cuts “a start in the right direction” on the deficit shortly after its enactment in July 2025. Now, he continues to say it is driving economic growth.
“You’re seeing it now with all the investment that’s being made in new equipment, new plants and jobs coming out of that, so that’s where the tax revenue comes from,” Estes told MS NOW.
But when asked how the government is still running a steep deficit, Estes said there is plenty of work to be done.
“There’s a whole host of other issues we need to address on our total spending at the federal level,” Estes said.
After the law was enacted, Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., said in July 2025 that the tax-cut extensions would “increase by more than a full percentage point each year for the next four years and actually drive down our deficits each year.”
Now, Smith’s argument is no longer focused on whether the law will reduce the deficit.
When asked if he had any regrets about the cost of the tax law, Smith told MS NOW he has “regrets about Democrats wanting to increase taxes on every single American.”
The post Republicans said their tax cuts would pay for themselves. Now they are confronting reality. appeared first on MS NOW.
