Trumps Fiscal Legacy: A Comprehensive Overview of Spending, Taxes, and Deficits

When President Trump entered the Oval Office, CBO projected the cumulative 2017-2027 budget deficits would be $10.0 trillion. When he left office four years later, CBO’s projected deficits for the same period were $13.9 trillion. The president signed or enacted $7.8 trillion in new initiatives, the costs of which were partially offset by $3.9 trillion saved from economic growth revenues and technical re-estimates of taxes and spending levels. Economic and technical factors produced a substantial $3.9 trillion in actual and projected savings over this period. Of this amount, $2.7 trillion comes from falling interest rate projections, which reduced the projected cost of net interest on the national debt. Another $1.3 trillion comes from higher tax revenues produced by faster economic growth projections.Technical re-estimates have reduced mandatory spending projections but also tax revenues. Most of these savings are projected to occur later in the 2017-2027 period and thus may not materialize if economic growth slows or interest rates rise. President Trump signed legislation and approved executive actions costing $7.8 trillion over the decade—compared to $5.0 trillion for President Obama and $6.9 trillion for President Bush, and he enacted these costs in just a single four-year presidential term, compared to his predecessors’ eight years in the Oval Office. The largest drivers were pandemic relief legislation ($3.9 trillion), the 2017 tax cuts ($2.0 trillion), and legislation raising the discretionary spending caps ($1.6 trillion). presidents are also limited to signing what Congress will pass. And during the Trump presidency, much of the $8 trillion in enacted legislation was passed by overwhelmingly bipartisan Congressional majorities.Consider the eight bills that Congress passed and President Trump signed costing at least $100 billion over the baseline, plus a separate pandemic relief bill (P.L. 166-159) that accelerated nearly $100 billion in previously enacted expenses. The most partisan of these nine bills was obviously the 2017 tax cuts (which also repealed the Obamacare individual mandate penalty). That law was passed exclusively by Republicans without a single Democratic vote. (See Figure 7 in the appendix for the largest bills signed during the Trump presidency.) The other eight bills—which consisted of five pandemic-relief laws, the 2018 and 2019 Bipartisan Budget Acts that raised the discretionary spending caps, and the 2019 law repealing key Obamacare taxes—were generally bipartisan. In fact, each of the eight bills passed the Senate with the majority support of both Republicans and Democrats. Senate Democrats cumulatively voted 94% in favor of these bills, and Senate Republicans cumulatively voted 76% in favor—not counting the CARES Act that passed the Senate by voice vote. A similar phenomenon occurred during the Obama presidency, when $5.0 trillion in enacted legislation was dominated by $4.1 trillion in bipartisan extensions of various current tax policies such as the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. In fact, the $1 trillion stimulus legislation in 2009 was the only major deficit-hiking bill passed by an almost-exclusively Democratic majority during those eight years. Over the previous two presidencies, the vast majority of new deficit-expanding bills has been enthusiastically bipartisan.

Brian Riedl, "Trump’s Fiscal Legacy: A Comprehensive Overview of Spending, Taxes, and Deficits,"Manhattan Institute, May 12, 2022, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/trumps-fiscal-legacy