Sponsors
The bill standardizes and simplifies the discretionary baseline for scorekeepers and Congress by freezing certain adjustments and excluding emergency/supplemental spending, trading off clearer, more administrable budget scoring against risks of understating future program needs, politicizing savings claims, adverse deficit optics, and potential loss of an existing grant provision.
Budget scorekeepers (CBO/OMB), House and Senate Budget Committees, and Congress get a simpler, more predictable baseline by assuming continuation of current discretionary funding levels, reducing year‑to‑year scoring complexity and administrative burden for budget analysis.
Taxpayers and Congress benefit from excluding emergency‑designated and supplemental resources from the baseline because one‑time emergency spending will no longer inflate baseline projections, improving clarity about recurring versus nonrecurring commitments.
Prohibiting inflation indexing and other baseline adjustments creates a stable, comparable baseline across years, which can make legislative planning and cross‑year budget comparisons more straightforward for scorekeepers and policymakers.
State governments, low‑income individuals, middle‑class families, and beneficiaries of discretionary programs could face increased pressure for cuts because removing indexing and exceptions may understate future discretionary funding needs, leading to tighter appropriations or reduced services.
Altering baseline methodology increases the risk of politicizing budget scoring and enables lawmakers to claim savings or justify policy changes without corresponding real dollar reductions, undermining trust in fiscal projections and transparency for taxpayers and policymakers.
Households and taxpayers could see larger reported deficits or smaller implicit offsets in official fiscal presentations if inflation indexing and adjustments are removed, which may affect public perceptions of the fiscal outlook and influence economic policy decisions.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Revises federal baseline rules to use current law and current discretionary levels, remove inflation/indexing adjustments, and exclude emergency/supplemental funds from the baseline.
Introduced April 22, 2026 by Roger Wayne Marshall · Last progress April 22, 2026
Rewrites how the federal budget baseline is calculated by directing that projections be based on current law and the assumption that current discretionary funding levels continue. It removes several exceptions and routine adjustments (including inflation/indexing adjustments) from baseline calculations and excludes emergency-designated and supplemental appropriations from discretionary baseline estimates, which will change how agencies and Congress score and compare costs of proposals.