Sponsor
Roger Wayne Marshall
Senator · R-KS
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.
Introduced June 17, 2025 by Roger Wayne Marshall · Last progress June 17, 2025
Senator · R-KS
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).