The Congressional Budget Office told House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a letter Tuesday night that the debt ceiling bill negotiated between House GOP leadership and the White House would reduce budget deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.
If the bill is enacted, the agency wrote that “mandatory spending would, on net, decrease by $10 billion, and revenues would, on net, decrease by $2 billion over the 2023–2033 period."
“As a consequence, interest on the public debt would decline by $188 billion," the letter read.
Discretionary spending would also be reduced by a projected $1.3 trillion over the 2024-2033 period.
But in a troubling sign for McCarthy, the CBO also warned that changes to work requirement provisions in the food stamps program “would increase federal spending by about $2.1 billion over the 2023–2033 period.”
The bill would increase the upper age limit of the existing work requirement through 54, but veterans, homeless Americans and former foster youth of all ages would be exempt. Combined, these provisions would increase the number of people receiving benefits by about 78,000 people in an average month during the 2025 to 2030 period, when they were fully in effect, according to the agency.
GOP members had insisted on broadening work requirements for those in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as food stamps are formally known.
The bill would also make changes to the work requirements in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which the CBO estimates would reduce direct spending by $5 million over the decade.
The CBO told McCarthy that rescinding the funding for the Internal Revenue Service would “result in fewer enforcement actions over the next decade and in a reduction in revenue collections.”
The CBO estimates that those changes would account for a $1.4 billion decrease in spending outlays, but a larger $2.3 billion decrease in revenues, and an increase in the deficit by an additional $900 million.