House Social, Climate Package to Add $367 Billion to Deficit Over a Decade, CBO Says
Lawmakers closing in on vote on roughly $2 trillion education, healthcare and climate legislation
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would take up a procedural vote on Thursday before voting on the social-spending and climate bill.PHOTO: JIM WATSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By
Andrew Duehren
and
Richard Rubin
Updated Nov. 18, 2021 6:30 pm ET
WASHINGTON—House Democrats’ education, healthcare and climate package will expand the U.S. budget deficit by $367 billion over a decade, Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper found, diverging from the Biden administration’s view that the bill’s cost is fully covered with new revenue.
The CBO score, demanded by some centrist Democrats as a condition for supporting the bill, has been at the center of the party’s efforts to pass the package in the House this week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D., Calif.) said Thursday that Democrats would move ahead with a vote as soon as Thursday evening.
Some of the discrepancy between the CBO’s analysis and previous White House estimates stems from how to count revenue generated by enhanced tax enforcement at the Internal Revenue Service. CBO said Thursday that pouring roughly $80 billion into the IRS would increase revenue by $207 billion, netting the government about $127 billion over 10 years, while the White House has said such an investment would net $400 billion.
Because of congressional scoring rules, the IRS figure isn’t counted toward CBO’s official bottom-line estimate of the bill’s impact on the deficit. But adding the gain from the CBO’s estimate of IRS enforcement revenue would still result in a deficit.
A group of five centrist Democrats, who had previously blocked a vote on the roughly $2 trillion bill, pledged to support it this week if they received information from CBO showing the cost was broadly in line with the administration’s estimates on its cost.
Several of those centrists have said they expect and accept that CBO will find the IRS provision generating less revenue than the White House has advertised.
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