Why Biden’s Claim of Cutting the Deficit Is False, in a Single Chart

Since President Joe Biden took office office early last year, America’s long-term budget deficit has grown by $2.4 trillion.

But that fact seems to get obscured in coverage—even skeptical coverage—of the White House’s claims about reducing the federal deficit.

Starting in this year’s State of the Union address and continuing through through his op-ed last month in The Wall Street Journal, Biden has constantly claimed to have overseen a huge one-year reduction in the budget deficit. Indeed, this year’s deficit is expected to be less than half of last year’s $2.8 trillion shortfall. Smart reporters and commentators have pointed out, correctly, that this drop in the deficit is a mirage created by the end of the federal government’s COVID-19 emergency spending, which blasted the budget deficit to never-before-seen levels during each of the past two fiscal years.

That’s an important caveat, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The White House’s claims of deficit reduction are not merely “misleading” or “actually true…but uttterly deceitful“; they are absolutely, definitively false.

To prove it, all you have to do is look at the current budgetary baseline released last month by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and compare it to the baseline from February 2021. In other words, compare the trajectory of deficit spending at the very end of the Trump administration to the current trajectory of deficit spending after one year of Biden’s term in office. Here’s how that looks, courtesy of David Ditch, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who helpfully put the two trajectories into a single chart:

You can see the big drop-off from fiscal year 2021 to fiscal year 2022 that the White House has been talking about. What hardly anyone is discussing is the gap between the red bars and the grey bars in every year over the next decade. That gap is the result of deficit spending that Biden signed into law over the past 16 months, including the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure package, and spending increases included in the federal budget that passed in March.

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