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Requires major changes to how the federal budget is prepared, justified, and reviewed: the Congressional Budget Office must publish the models, data, and assumptions it uses for cost estimates; the Office of Management and Budget and the President must adopt a zero‑based approach to justify each funded activity; and both Congress and the President must move many budget actions to a two‑year (biennial) cycle. The bill also tightens Senate budget enforcement, creates a new enforceable point of order to strip unreported budget provisions, and redefines the federal budget baseline with an effective date in 2027. These changes increase transparency of analytic tools, impose detailed justification and documentation requirements across executive branch budget offices and agencies, and alter congressional procedure and timing for budget resolutions and committees, producing both higher administrative burdens and stronger procedural constraints on future legislation and spending decisions.
States that the table of contents for this Act is provided (section heading: “The table of contents for this Act is as follows.”). The chunk provided does not include the actual table entries or any substantive provisions.
Amends Section 402 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 (2 U.S.C. 653) by replacing certain wording in subsection (a) with new text beginning 'The Director;'.
Amends the undesignated matter following subsection (a)(3) of Section 402 by replacing text with new wording beginning 'The estimates;'.
Requires the Director of the CBO to make available to Members of Congress and to the public on the CBO website each fiscal model, policy model, and data preparation routine used by the CBO in estimating costs and other fiscal, social, or economic effects of legislation, including estimates prepared under subsection (a).
Requires the Director to make publicly available any update of a model or routine described in the prior paragraph.
Primary federal actors affected:
Congressional Budget Office (CBO): must expand publication of analytical tools, models, and (where permitted) underlying data and code. This increases transparency but requires investment in documentation, legal review, and publication infrastructure; CBO also will need processes for identifying nondisclosable items and managing controlled access.
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the President's budget office: must develop and publish zero‑based budgeting guidelines, review and incorporate comprehensive justifications for every activity, and adapt budget submission formats to cover two fiscal years in odd‑numbered years. This imposes substantial analytic and coordination work on OMB and agency budget examiners.
Federal agencies and program managers: required to prepare detailed activity‑level justifications, legal bases, cost analyses, alternative funding scenarios, and performance/efficiency metrics for inclusion in the President's budget. Agencies will face higher administrative workload, possible reallocation of staff toward documentation and performance measurement, and potential program reviews that could influence funding decisions.
Congress (Members, committees, and staff): must adapt to a biennial budgeting cadence, revised allocation rules, and stronger points of order in the Senate. Budget committees and authorizing/appropriations committees will revise timetables, and floor strategy must account for tougher waiver thresholds and the new surgical strike mechanism. Increased transparency from CBO may affect legislative drafting and oversight but sensitive nondisclosure limits remain.
Public stakeholders, researchers, and outside budget model users: greater access to CBO methods and (where allowed) data will improve external analysis, oversight, and replication of cost estimates; however, some proprietary or classified inputs may remain restricted with only summary statistics made public.
Potential consequences and tradeoffs:
Administrative costs will rise as federal offices create the documentation, IT, and processes needed to publish models, justify activities, and support biennial submissions. Smaller program offices may be stretched by new reporting duties.
Transparency gains could improve public trust, external peer review, and legislative accountability, but risks include politicization of model choices, legal disputes over nondisclosure, and challenges protecting classified or proprietary inputs.
Zero‑based expectations may encourage efficiency reviews and program scrutiny, but they also risk destabilizing programs that rely on multi‑year implementation or that require annual funding flexibility.
Biennial budgeting may offer longer planning horizons and reduce the frequency of year‑end continuing resolutions, but it may also complicate responses to unexpected economic changes or emergencies and concentrate contentious decisions into the biennial calendar.
Overall, the legislation restructures budget transparency and process, producing stronger procedural controls and analytic disclosure while creating substantial implementation burdens and potential operational and political frictions.
Adds a new subsection (j) to 31 U.S.C. 1105 establishing zero-based budgeting requirements for the President's budget submissions, including detailed activity-level descriptions, legal basis, examinations of objectives/operations/costs, alternative funding levels (including at least two below current funding), summaries of priorities at each level, measures of cost efficiency/effectiveness, an exclusion for certain Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs, and a requirement that OMB publish guidelines assuming a zero baseline.
Amends the baseline statute (Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act §257) by replacing subsection (a) with a new definition of baseline for any biennium; revising subsection (b) by replacing paragraph (1), striking paragraph (2), and redesignating paragraph (3) as paragraph (2); and revising subsection (c) by modifying paragraph (1) to exclude emergency-designated resources and supplemental appropriations, striking paragraphs (2)–(5), redesignating paragraph (6) as paragraph (2), and adding a new paragraph (3) that prohibits adjustments for inflation or other factors.
Makes conforming amendments to section 202(e)(1) of the Congressional Budget Act by inserting specified text and striking specified subsequent text (exact insertion and struck text are not reproduced in this section).
Modifies section 403(a)(3) of the Social Security Act by striking subparagraph (G) and redesignating subparagraph (H) as subparagraph (G).
Strikes subsections (c), (d), and (e) of Section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 (codified at this citation) and inserts new subsections establishing (c) a list of specified sections that may be waived or suspended in the Senate only by the affirmative vote of two‑thirds of the Members, duly chosen and sworn; and (d) appeal procedures limiting appeals to 1 hour (equally divided and controlled by the mover and manager of the measure) and requiring an affirmative two‑thirds vote to sustain an appeal of the Chair's ruling for a specified list of sections.
Revises subsection (a) (the Senate provision) to replace the existing single-paragraph rule with a multi‑paragraph point-of-order framework: (1) restates that provisions within the jurisdiction of the Senate Budget Committee are out of order unless in a bill/joint resolution reported by (or discharged from) that Committee or in specified related amendments/motions; (2) provides that if such a point of order is sustained the provision shall be stricken and may not be offered as a floor amendment; (3) permits raising a point of order as provided in section 313(e); and (4) prescribes procedures when a point of order is sustained against conference reports or House amendments, including striking the material and limited debate (1 hour) and constraints on further amendment.
Amends section 4(g)(3)(B) (codified at 2 U.S.C. 933(g)(3)(B)(i)) of the Statutory Pay‑As‑You‑Go Act by replacing each occurrence of the existing threshold language with the phrase 'two-thirds'.
Amends 2 U.S.C. 653 (Section 402 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974) by redesignating/rewriting portions into subsections (a) and (b) and adding a new subsection (c) that requires the Director of the Congressional Budget Office to publish models, routines, updates, and, subject to nondisclosure limits, the data, programs, models, assumptions, and computational details used to prepare cost and fiscal-effect estimates, and to provide specified information for data that cannot be disclosed.
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Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Budget.
Introduced June 17, 2025 by Roger Wayne Marshall · Last progress June 17, 2025
Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Budget.
Introduced in Senate