The U.S. Senate voted to approve a provision in the 2026 budget act that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) helped craft that could hide how much President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" will add to the overall national debt.
Igor Bobic wrote for the Huffington Post Monday that Republicans are trying to find a way to conceal the trillions being added to the deficit.
When Trump entered office, he drastically cut government programs, funding and staff under the claim that the deficit needed to be cut substantially. The new 2026 budget bill before the U.S. Senate will zero out all of those savings and add trillions of dollars more, Bobic wrote. He called it a kind of "debt bomb."
The Graham amendment was described by Huffington Post's Jennifer Bendery. "Republicans just voted to weaken the Senate filibuster by using a gimmick to hide the cost of Trump's ~$4 trillion tax-and-spending bill," she wrote.
After debate over the weekend, even Republican lawmakers admitted what Trump loyalists are trying to do is a bomb to the national debt.
“That is an admission they know they aren’t controlling the deficit,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Sunday. “They know that the ensuing years will add trillions more. The authors of the bill are anticipating adding more ...That’s why I’m a no.”
Over the weekend, Democrats challenged some aspects of the legislation, arguing that they didn't comply with the requirements for a "reconciliation bill," which would allow Congress to bypass avoid a filibuster and fast-track the bill by allowing it to pass with a majority of 51, instead of mandating a 60-vote supermajority.
According to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis, the budget baseline employs traditional "current law" to generate calculations. Deficits would increase after 2034 as a result of the measure. Democrats argue that it violates the rule that a reconciliation bill cannot add to the deficit beyond 10 years.
"Republicans refused to allow a bipartisan meeting specifically on the use of 'current policy,'" wrote Bobic. "They maintained that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), has the sole authority to determine which accounting method can be used to pass legislation."
Meaning, only Graham's calculations can be used, and no others matter.
"Chair Graham has set that we will be using current policy baseline, therefore, no [reconciliation] rules are violated as Dems have suggested," claimed a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) when speaking to HuffPo.
“I’m not the first chairman to change the baseline for different reasons,” Graham said on Sunday.