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Trump's big bill could have small economic impact, experts warn

14 9
26.06.2025

The Senate version of President Trump's domestic policy bill will likely fall short of its ambitious promises for economic growth and fiscal responsibility, economists are warning.

While the Senate version will have some substantial differences from the version passed in the House in May, the overall structure of the bill remains in place, with the big pieces of the 2017 Trump tax cuts featuring as the centerpiece.

Republicans say the measures will boost growth, create jobs and won’t balloon the deficit.

The White House released a report Wednesday claiming the bill would boost economic growth by nearly 5 percent and create roughly 7 million jobs over the next four years — far higher than any independent analysis of the bill has found.

Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill is projected to deliver major economic gains in the first four years," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a Wednesday social media post.

Economists, investors and tax experts are telling a different story about the bill, tempering their expectations for growth and pointing to the bill’s redistributive effects and its deficit expansion, much of which is being swept under the rug using some creative accounting.

“From a macroeconomic perspective, it probably has little effect,” Reuven Avi-Yonah, a professor of tax law at the University of Michigan, told The Hill. “I’m always a bit skeptical of the growth potential resulting from tax cuts. And it increases the deficit significantly in a higher interest rate environment, and that’s not ideal.”

Growth projections are small

Official growth projections for the bill are modest. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), Congress’s official tax scorer, predicted the House version of the bill would increase the average annual growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.03 percentage points, from 1.83 to 1.86 percent, through 2034.

This is less than growth resulting from the tax cuts when they were first passed in 2017 and measured in 2018. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congress’s official legislative scorer, separated out the effects of the tax cuts in 2018 and found them to produce an increase in potential GDP of 0.2 percent, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

GDP growth popped in the second quarter of 2018 above 4 percent, which may have been due to demand-side........

© The Hill