The Federal Deficit

Every year the federal government spends more than it collects, and the gap, the deficit, is borrowed and added to the national debt. Almost everyone in Congress says the gap is too big. The disagreement is entirely about how to close it, and that disagreement sorts cleanly into two directions with a bridge in the middle.

One direction is to spend less. The bills here run from the modest to the sweeping. The narrowest simply cancels money already approved: a 2025 rescission law clawed back about $9 billion and is the one measure on this page that actually became law. A larger step would repeal the 1974 statute that stops a president from refusing to spend appropriated funds, restoring the power to withhold money to hold down outlays. The furthest-reaching would write a spending limit into the Constitution itself.

The other direction is to collect more, and every one of these bills raises the money from the top. The smallest adds a surtax on income above a million dollars. A bigger change would tax the yearly growth in billionaires' assets before they are ever sold, something today's code does not do. The largest would tax accumulated wealth directly, a yearly levy on the largest fortunes.

Between the two sits a different kind of answer: don't pick cuts or taxes now, but force a bipartisan commission to write a plan and guarantee it a vote. It is the one measure here with heavy support from both parties, and it is a bet that the tradeoffs are easier to make together than alone.

None of these bills is endorsed here. Most sit in committee, so where a member stands is usually read from whether they put their name on the bill; two of them, the rescission and the constitutional cap, reached a recorded vote, which is the stronger signal and is marked as such. They are chosen because together they map the real range of what Congress is weighing, and because each is a documented fact you can check yourself in the record linked below.