Sponsors
This bill increases budget transparency, procedural discipline, and multi‑year planning for Congress and agencies, but it does so by adding significant analytic and reporting burdens, reducing annual oversight flexibility, and creating risks of program underfunding and data/privacy exposure.
Researchers, Members of Congress, and taxpayers: the CBO will be required to publish models, code, assumptions, and data (with safeguards) so outside analysts can replicate and validate score results, increasing transparency and external error‑checking.
Congress and federal agencies: shifting to biennial budgeting (President submits two‑year budgets and Congress sets two‑year appropriations with earlier deadlines) reduces year-to-year uncertainty and supports multi‑year planning for programs and agencies.
Taxpayers and budget decisionmakers: agencies must justify every appropriated activity, present alternative funding levels, and measure cost‑effectiveness, helping identify low‑value programs and clarifying tradeoffs for appropriators.
Agencies, OMB/CBO, and taxpayers: requiring published replication materials, zero‑based reviews, and biennial budget preparations will create substantial new administrative workloads, IT/hiring needs, and short‑term costs paid by taxpayers.
Recipients of government programs, nonprofits, and state/local partners: forcing programs to justify funding from a zero baseline and present lower funding options risks across‑the‑board cuts, underfunding effective services, and destabilizing beneficiaries and community providers.
Taxpayers, Congress, and state/local governments: moving to biennial appropriations and raising procedural bars for budget measures reduces annual oversight and flexibility, making it harder to respond quickly to emergencies or changing priorities without supplemental action.
Based on analysis of 11 sections of legislative text.
Rewrites federal budget rules: requires CBO to publish models/data, mandates zero‑based biennial agency budgets, changes baseline rules, and raises Senate thresholds for budget points of order.
Introduced June 17, 2025 by Roger Wayne Marshall · Last progress June 17, 2025
Requires major changes to how the federal budget is prepared, published, and considered. It forces the Congressional Budget Office to publish the models and data behind cost estimates, requires the President to submit zero‑based budget documents (moving to a two‑year, biennial zero‑based approach starting in 2027), changes how the federal baseline is calculated, shifts budget timing to a biennial cycle, and raises Senate vote thresholds and new points of order to limit consideration of measures not cleared by the Senate Budget Committee. The law mostly changes process and transparency (not direct spending or tax rates). It creates new administrative work for agencies, new disclosure for CBO products, tighter rules for baseline projections, and procedural hurdles in the Senate. Key provisions take effect on staged dates: some in six months, several on January 1, 2027, and the biennial budgeting rules apply beginning with the FY2028 biennium.