Analysts warned that a collision between two policies pushed by president Donald Trump could cause a "fiscal disaster."
The president went to Capitol Hill to urge Republicans to unite behind a budget-busting budget bill, and Axios reported that his strong-arm tactics were putting conservatives into a precarious position.
"Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' is projected to add trillions to the deficit over the next decade — rattling conservatives who have long warned that the U.S. is barreling toward fiscal catastrophe," Axios reported. "Some Republicans now find themselves trapped between two of the party's most animating principles: Deficit reduction vs. absolute loyalty to Trump."
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The White House is hoping the budget bill will receive a vote on the House floor this week, and the president and his aides have brushed off warnings that the tax cuts embedded in the measure would explode the national debt without politically toxic cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
"This tax bill's enormity is being underplayed ... [It] will cost more than the 2017 tax cuts, the pandemic CARES Act, Biden's stimulus, and the Inflation Reduction Act combined," Jessica Riedl, a budget specialist at the conservative Manhattan Institute, told Yahoo Finance.
Trump officials insist they inherited huge deficits from the Biden administration and argue their spending cuts, deregulation, tariffs and other policies will bring down the debt, which now exceeds $36 trillion, but economic analysts are dubious.
"[Those projections] assume consistent economic growth," Jim Millstein, a former chief restructuring officer at the Treasury Department, told Bloomberg. "Just imagine the Trump tariffs ... cause a recession. They are risking a fiscal disaster."