Patrick Driessen, Senate OBBBA Deficit Denial Was Decades in the Making, 189 Tax Notes Federal 2013 (Dec. 22, 2025)

The Senate used a current-policy baseline for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21). That baseline suppressed $3.8 trillion each of revenue losses and deficit increases in the scoring of permanency for some temporary tax provisions first initiated in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.[] The rationale for this deemed nonscoring preference seemed to rely on the notion that the public — or more narrowly, a set of taxpayers — expected the extension of these provisions.

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Many groups (and especially the administrations of three presidents) contributed, knowingly or not, to the culmination of the current-policy baseline in the OBBBA. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations used current-policy baselines in budget presentations and other fiscal analyses, and the second Trump administration implicitly approved the Senate’s use of the method by signing off on the OBBBA bill.

Policymaker-dictated boutique baselines could wreck objective revenue and cost estimates, income and tax distributions, and macroeconomic analyses of future policy proposals. In addition to tracing the emergence of the current-policy baseline, this article considers how to end its use by policymakers in the assignment of fiscal responsibility. …