A series of reports found that President Biden has spent more with executive actions than did former President Donald Trump, but the Republican vastly outspent his successor during his term.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget conducted the series of analyses, which looked at the executive actions taken by both men and the spending they approved, and how those decisions affected how much money the nation would borrow over the next decade, and how that would impact the national debt.
The latest report, released last week, focused on how the differing executive orders taken by Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump would affect borrowing and increases to the federal debt over the next decade. The national debt stood at $34.9 trillion on Wednesday.
Maya McGuineas, president of the CFRB, wrote in an opinion piece for CNN after the latest that there are “certain signs of fiscal mismanagement by government that no country should ignore,” including running up the debt, bloated interest payments squeezing out other parts of the budget, and promising benefits with no plan to pay for them.
“Disturbingly, this is an accurate description of how the U.S. has been operating for quite some time now,” Ms. McGuineas wrote. “Yet neither of the leading presidential candidates has a serious proposal to address these troubling trends.”
Mr. Biden’s slew of executive actions during his time in office accounted for a projected $1.2 trillion in added debt, while Mr. Trump’s smaller list of executive action would add $13 billion over the next decade.
The largest chunk of Mr. Biden’s debt-growing decisions included his actions toward forgiving student debt, which accounted for a projected $620 billion increase to the federal deficit. That total could drop by about $330 billion depending on how the courts rule on Mr. Biden’s Income-Driven Repayment proposal, which was introduced earlier this year and put on hold by federal courts.
The rest comes from changes made to Medicaid enrollment and repayment rules, tweaks to Medicare’s drug rebate rule, and the Affordable Care Act’s “family glitch,” among others.
Mr. Trump’s additions to the national debt paled in comparison, and stemmed from executive actions that eliminated payments in cost-sharing reductions in the Affordable Care Act to the tune of $252 billion, and changes in prescription drug rebate rules that accounted for $204 billion in added debt.
But much of Mr. Trump’s debt-growing executive actions were offset by roughly $443 billion in new and increased tariffs.
Another analysis from the CFRB released last month found that while Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have approved roughly the same in federal spending, deep spending cuts approved by the Biden administration have lessened the impact to the debt more than the Trump administration.
Mr. Trump approved $5.3 trillion in spending while in the White House, which was offset by about $500 billion in spending cuts. Mr. Biden has so far approved $5.7 trillion in spending, which has been heavily offset by $1.9 trillion in spending cuts from last year’s debt-ceiling deal.
The former president also enacted about $2.9 trillion in tax cuts while he increased taxes by $400 billion. Meanwhile, Mr. Biden changed taxes little — he approved roughly $600 billion in cuts and raised taxes by about $600 billion.
The report found that because of these actions, Mr. Trump increased 10-year interest costs by $1 trillion, while Mr. Biden has so far increased the same costs by $500 billion.
Ms. McGuineas believed that the cuts from the debt-ceiling deal, which capped spending through fiscal 2025, was a “step in the right direction,” but whoever of the two becomes the next president needs to address and deal with the growing debt crisis.
“The candidates owe the country an honest plan for how they would pay for their agendas and begin to put the debt on a sustainable path,” she wrote.
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.
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