Even with COVID, Trump spent trillions less than Biden during his presidency

In an estimation of decadelong spending and revenue projections, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget claimed former President Donald Trump approved $8.4 trillion of new debt during his presidency compared to $4.3 trillion approved by President Joe Biden. But the CRFB admitted projections are subject to change, and a total debt estimate over the course of 10 years arguably misleads from the reality. Per my own analysis, Trump spent at least a trillion dollars less while he was president, including during the pandemic spending spree, than Biden will spend during the first four years of his own presidency.

CRFB’s strategy is to compare all the spending bills and executive orders signed by each president and tally up their net increases and decreases to the national debt. While this approach is laudable in its attempt to determine the long-term effect of presidential policies, it ignores the responsibility of successors to modify policies they dislike and the vast variation in scores. For example, the CRFB estimates the 10-year cost of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act at $1.9 trillion, even though wildly increased overall federal revenue streams have led the Joint Committee on Taxation to estimate the cost dynamically at $1.5 trillion and the Tax Foundation to estimate it at as little as half a trillion dollars. On the other hand, the CRFB claimed Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act reduces the deficit by $252 billion, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently conceded the Inflation Reduction Act will actually add $300 billion from 2024 to 2033. Again, this does not mean the CRFB is being dishonest, but the decadelong approach requires it to pick and choose among a wide range of expert estimations.