The national debt is roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy and growing by trillions a year — should Congress raise revenue, cut spending, or is the deficit not the emergency it's made out to be?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
The 2025 tax law made the 2017 tax cuts permanent at a projected cost of $3.4 to $4.1 trillion over ten years including interest — a major driver of the growing deficit — while cutting Medicaid by the largest amount in the program's history to help pay for it. Permanent tax cuts for the same income brackets that already benefited most in 2017 are not worth the health coverage millions of Americans are projected to lose.
CBO's own estimates for the law range widely depending on assumptions — from roughly $2.4 trillion in initial static scoring to over $4.5 trillion once behavioral and interest effects are included — which is itself the point: this is a genuinely large, contested number that scorekeepers on both sides mostly agree is large, even if they disagree on exactly how large.
The law's tax cuts are pro-growth, not merely costly — CBO's own dynamic modeling found the bill would grow GDP by an average of 0.5% over the decade, and the administration's Council of Economic Advisers projects meaningfully larger growth once the full range of the law's provisions are accounted for. Extending tax cuts that were already in effect and already priced into people's financial planning isn't a new tax cut, it's avoiding a tax increase on everyone.
The 2025 tax law raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion in the same bill that cut taxes and Medicaid — tying a routine, must-pass increase in the government's borrowing authority to an unrelated and deeply partisan reconciliation bill, rather than letting Congress debate and raise the ceiling on its own, transparent terms.
Whatever one thinks of how the debt ceiling got raised this time, the recurring pattern — a genuine risk of default used as leverage in unrelated fights — has repeated across multiple administrations of both parties for over a decade. Structural reforms that separate the debt ceiling from spending fights entirely, which lawmakers on both sides have proposed at various points, would remove the recurring brinkmanship without changing how much Congress actually spends.
Raising the debt ceiling by a fixed $5 trillion inside a single reconciliation bill at least avoided a separate, standalone debt-ceiling showdown and the market uncertainty that comes with approaching a default deadline — a legitimate way to handle a routine legal formality that doesn't itself authorize a single additional dollar of spending beyond what Congress already appropriated.
The government shut down twice within about seven months — a 43-day shutdown from October to November 2025 (the longest in U.S. history) and a second, roughly ten-week partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security from February to April 2026 tied to a stalled dispute over immigration enforcement reform. TSA employees missed a full paycheck during the second shutdown before an executive order restored their pay — real harm to real federal workers used as leverage in a policy fight that had nothing to do with routine funding.
The Senate's unanimous May 2026 vote to withhold senators' own pay during future shutdowns is a small but genuinely bipartisan acknowledgment that repeated shutdowns are a process failure, not a negotiating tool that should exist at all. Regular-order appropriations — passing all twelve bills on time, as Congress hasn't managed since 1997 — remains the actual fix neither party has consistently prioritized.
Shutdowns are a constitutionally legitimate consequence of Congress's own failure to agree on spending, not an executive abuse — the Constitution vests the power of the purse in Congress, and when Congress can't reach agreement on time, a lapse in funding for non-essential functions is the system working as designed, however painful. The 2026 shutdowns ended once Congress passed the specific bills in dispute, which is the process resolving itself.
The FY2026 spending deal cut the IRS's enforcement budget by 8%, to its lowest level since 1988 after adjusting for inflation, and rescinded most of the remaining Inflation Reduction Act funding meant to rebuild the agency's capacity to audit complex, high-income returns. Every dollar cut from IRS enforcement loses the government more than a dollar in uncollected taxes owed — this isn't fiscal discipline, it's a tax cut for the wealthiest filers who can afford sophisticated avoidance.
The final FY2026 deal was less severe than the House's initial proposal of a 45% enforcement cut and a 23% overall cut, settling instead on an 8% enforcement reduction and a 9% cut to the base budget — a genuine, if painful, compromise between the House's steeper ask and the Senate's push to hold enforcement funding flat at 2025 levels.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act handed the IRS an unprecedented $80 billion, multi-year funding boost with minimal ongoing congressional oversight of how it would be spent. Rescinding the unspent portion and setting annual funding through the normal appropriations process, as Congress did for FY2026, restores standard budgetary accountability over an agency whose modernization spending had shown limited results.
Counting on tariff revenue to help offset the 2025 tax law's cost treats an unstable, legally contested revenue source as a reliable budget offset. Tariffs function as a tax on American consumers and importers, not foreign exporters, and ongoing litigation over the President's tariff authority could eliminate a significant share of that projected revenue with little warning.
CBO's own baseline now assumes a meaningful and growing stream of customs-duty revenue as a real, if unusually volatile, part of the federal government's income — a genuine change from prior decades when tariffs were a rounding error in the federal budget. Whether that revenue proves durable depends on trade negotiations and court rulings that are still unresolved.
Tariff revenue is now large enough that CBO projects total federal revenue will exceed its 50-year historical average as a share of GDP even after the 2025 tax cuts — a sign that trade policy can meaningfully help offset lost income-tax revenue without raising rates on American workers and businesses directly.