By Ben Ritz, Director of PPI’s Center for Funding America’s Future
Republicans in Congress have been eager to position themselves as the fiscally responsible counterweight to what they consider budget-busting and inflation-increasing overspending from the Biden administration. But just two weeks into their new majority, House Republicans have shown their true colors and it’s more likely than not that they will make our nation’s fiscal problems even worse.
The first bill passed by the new majority would repeal $71 billion in new funding for taxpayer services and enforcement by the IRS that Democrats passed last Congress. But an official score from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that this bill would also reduce revenue collections by $186 billion over the next decade because it would undermine the agency’s ability to make wealthy tax cheats pay what they owe. As a result, the first act by the new House majority would actually increase deficits by roughly $114 billion.
