Sponsors
Introduced June 17, 2025 by Roger Wayne Marshall · Last progress June 17, 2025
The bill improves transparency, multi-year planning, and budget discipline by requiring published CBO models, activity-level justifications, and biennial budgeting, but it increases administrative costs, risks program uncertainty and reduced flexibility, and creates privacy and procedural trade-offs.
Researchers, watchdogs, taxpayers, and Members of Congress: CBO must publish models, code, assumptions, and sufficient data detail so outside analysts can replicate and scrutinize cost estimates.
Taxpayers and the public: Federal agencies must provide activity-level budget justifications and identify performance and cost-efficiency measures, so taxpayers can see what programs do and agencies/OMB can make clearer trade-offs.
Taxpayers: Requirement to present at least two lower funding alternatives encourages consideration of spending reductions and may help restrain future spending growth.
Taxpayers and federal employees: The bill will create significant new administrative and transition costs for CBO, OMB, and agencies (publishing models, producing zero-based materials, revising baselines, and changing systems).
Program beneficiaries, state/local partners, and agency staff: Requiring lower-funding alternatives and zero-based, activity-level scrutiny raises the risk of program cuts, service disruption, and uncertainty for recipients and partners.
Taxpayers, states, and service providers: Locking appropriations into two-year commitments and restricting one-year authorizations reduces Congress's ability to respond quickly to economic shocks, emergencies, or short-term pilot needs.
Based on analysis of 11 sections of legislative text.
Reforms the federal budget process: requires CBO model transparency, mandates agency zero‑based budgets, shifts Congress to biennial budgeting, raises Senate thresholds, and changes baseline rules.
Requires major changes to how the federal budget is prepared, scored, and published: the Congressional Budget Office must publish its models and non‑disclosable-data summaries; the President must submit zero‑based budget materials for agencies (with a biennial zero‑based requirement beginning Jan 1, 2027); Congress moves much of its budget process from an annual to a biennial cycle; the Senate gets higher (two‑thirds) thresholds and new enforceable points of order for Budget Committee jurisdiction; and the budget baseline and baseline projections shift to a biennial basis with several baseline assumptions removed. Effective dates vary (some six months after enactment; major biennial/baseline changes apply beginning Jan 1, 2027 and to the FY2028 biennium).