H.R. 10078: Dollar-for-Dollar Deficit Reduction Act

This bill would change how Congress handles increases or suspensions of the federal debt limit.

What it requires

If the Treasury Department thinks the government is getting close to the debt limit, it would have to send a warning to the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. The warning would say when the government may need to use “extraordinary measures,” which are temporary steps Treasury can use to keep paying the government’s bills if the debt limit has not yet been raised.

The bill would also require that any formal presidential request to raise the debt limit be paired with proposed legislation that reduces federal spending over the current year and the next 10 years by at least the same amount as the requested debt-limit increase. Savings from lower interest payments would not count toward that required spending reduction.

Rules for Congress

The bill would create new parliamentary rules in both chambers of Congress. Under those rules, Congress generally would not be allowed to consider any bill, amendment, motion, or conference report that:

• raises the debt limit, unless it includes spending cuts at least equal to the increase; or
• suspends the debt limit, unless it includes spending cuts at least equal to the amount of debt projected to be added during the suspension.

These spending cuts would be measured over the current fiscal year plus the next 10 fiscal years. The bill says the calculations would be made using Congressional Budget Office estimates and a standard budget baseline, while ignoring spending that was already designated as emergency spending. It also says proposals cannot rely on shifting costs or revenues outside the 10-year budget window to make the spending cuts look larger.

Before Congress could vote on any debt-limit measure, the CBO cost estimate for that measure would have to be publicly available on the CBO website for at least 24 hours.

Senate procedures

In the Senate, the new rules could be waived or suspended only with a three-fifths vote of the full Senate. A three-fifths vote would also be needed to overturn a ruling by the chair on a point of order under these rules.

Plain-English effect

In practice, the bill would make it harder to raise or suspend the debt limit unless Congress also agrees on offsetting spending cuts. It would try to tie any increase in federal borrowing authority to an equal or greater reduction in federal spending over the next decade, with extra procedural hurdles in the House and Senate.

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