Senate GOP Uses Accounting Trick to Claim $4 Trillion Tax Cuts Are Free. House Republicans Aren’t Convinced.

Rep. Chip Roy previously claimed the Senate’s accounting trick amounted to “fairy dust.”

John Thune

Senate Majority Leader John Thune conducts a news conference after the Senate luncheons in the U.S. Capitol. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP

As Republicans inch closer to their ultimate goal of passing a reconciliation bill, the Senate GOP is charging ahead with a revised version of the House’s budget that calculates the fiscal impact of their legislation using a “current policy baseline.”

And while that may sound like an inconsequential detail only interesting to congressional budget nerds, there are trillions of reasons why that decision will have a massive impact. Literally.

Republicans are planning to claim that extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of the year and would cost about $400 billion a year for the next decade, would have zero budgetary impact.