Sponsors
Introduced June 17, 2025 by Roger Wayne Marshall · Last progress June 17, 2025
The bill increases transparency, multi-year predictability, and fiscal discipline in the federal budget process but does so at the cost of substantial upfront administrative burden, reduced near-term fiscal flexibility (especially for emergencies and inflation), and procedural rigidity that could disproportionately strain smaller agencies and complicate timely responses.
Taxpayers, Members of Congress, and independent researchers gain access to CBO models, data, and more detailed activity-level budget justifications, enabling outside replication, scrutiny, and clearer visibility into recurring federal spending.
Federal agencies, state and local recipients, and contractors get two-year appropriations and biennial planning, giving them more predictable funding and improved ability to plan multi-year projects.
Congress and taxpayers benefit from stronger procedural rules and scoring changes that limit ad-hoc budget insertions and emphasize current‑law scoring, which can improve fiscal transparency and discipline.
Federal agencies, OMB, and the CBO will face substantial new administrative and compliance costs (staff time, platform/legal reviews, reporting) to publish models, produce activity-level justifications, and prepare two‑year plans.
Taxpayers, state and local governments, and emergency responders could lose fiscal flexibility because biennial appropriations and baseline rules that exclude emergency/supplemental funding and inflation make rapid budget adjustments harder and understate future needs.
Smaller agencies, state and local governments, and some programs may lack capacity to produce robust zero‑based and efficiency metrics, leading to inconsistent justifications, superficial analysis, and risk of underfunding effective activities.
Based on analysis of 11 sections of legislative text.
Requires the Congressional Budget Office to publish the models, code, and data behind its cost and economic estimates (with limited nondisclosure exceptions); mandates zero‑based budgeting materials from agencies and shifts most federal budgeting and appropriations to a two‑year (biennial) cycle with new deadlines, points-of-order, and travel penalties tied to timely budgets. Also raises the Senate vote threshold to two‑thirds for waiving many budget rules and creates a new point of order to enforce Budget Committee jurisdiction, and it narrows how the federal budget baseline is defined. Most changes take effect in stages: some managerial actions begin in 2026, CBO transparency begins six months after enactment, and the main biennial and baseline rules apply starting January 1, 2027 (for the biennium beginning FY2028).