(Just The News)—House leaders have praised their early work on crafting a budget, but outside groups estimate the spending plan could add $25 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
Part of the disconnect is the extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts, which Republicans view as preventing a tax hike rather than a reduction in revenue. Extending the provisions could considerably add to U.S. debt without corresponding spending cuts. The Congressional Budget Office has said it won’t pay for itself without further budget offsets. Another issues is President Donald Trump’s tariff plan, which could raise revenue, but figuring out how much remains a challenge as Trump implements some tariffs and leaves others on pause.
In December, Trump promised to cut “hundreds of billions” in federal spending in 2025 through the reconciliation progress. Last week, Trump posted “balanced budget” in all capital letters followed by three exclamation points on Truth Social. He signed the post with his initials. Congress hasn’t proposed anything close to meeting those goals.
The House resolution would allocate $4.5 trillion to extend the president’s 2017 tax cuts. The House resolution raises the debt ceiling by $4 trillion and instructs congressional committees to find at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, only partially offsetting the tax cuts extension. In return, the bill would authorize a $300 billion increase in mandatory spending split among the Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Judiciary committees.
Trump’s comment aren’t the only ones that don’t square with the proposals Republicans have put forward.
U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, a longtime fiscal hawk, holds the House Budget Committee gavel, but it’s unclear if he’ll correct course on the nation’s spending even with Trump in the White House and narrow GOP majorities in both legislative chambers.
“This budget resolution is more than numbers on a ledger, it’s a blueprint for restoring America’s security, prosperity, and leadership in the world,” Arrington said. “It’s a promissory note for our children to preserve the land of liberty and opportunity by safeguarding it from an unwieldy government and the unbridled spending, taxing, and regulating that threatens to destroy it. This budget blueprint is the fiscal framework for our unified Republican leadership to rein in Washington’s reckless spending and endless bureaucracy, reignite economic growth and prosperity, and restore the bulwark of our common defense.”
However, the blueprint he’s talking about doesn’t stop the federal government from spending money it doesn’t have. An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the budget resolution includes $3.3 trillion of net allowable deficit increases. With interest, that would allow almost $4 trillion of additional debt. A bill consistent with those instructions would increase debt in 2034 to 126% of gross domestic product, a measure of economic output. The budget window – fiscal year 2025 through fiscal year 2034 – is an eight-year extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which could make the $4.8 trillion of tax cuts and spending increases in this budget window translate to $5.5-$6 trillion of 10-year increases, CRFB noted.
“Overall, the budget resolution would allow lawmakers to increase borrowing by nearly $4 trillion over the next decade at a time when it would be a mistake to make our fiscal situation worse,” the nonpartisan group said.
Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, said the House budget plan could add $25 trillion in debt over the next decade.
“Unfortunately, this resolution sets the stage for adding trillions more in new deficits and debt,” he said. “It allows for $4.5 trillion in revenue reductions, with only $1.2 trillion in offsets. All told, this plan would add more than $25 trillion to the debt over the next decade.”
Peterson said taxpayers can’t afford it and lawmakers should make changes.
“They should avoid budget gimmicks like unrealistic economic growth, undefined spending cuts, uncertain tariff revenue, or timing games, all of which simply conceal more debt,” he said. “The bottom line is that America is in terrible fiscal shape and the new administration and Congress have many available policy options to improve our fiscal outlook, or at the very least fully offset any policies they wish to enact or extend. Now is the time to prioritize our fiscal future and put our nation on a more sustainable path.”
Congress’ own research service, the Government Accountability Office, has for years been warning presidents and lawmakers that the nation remains on an unsustainable fiscal path. The GAO repeated those warnings last week.
A GAO report warned that unchecked spending could push public debt to 219% of GDP by 2051 and create a significant economic and national security risk.
“We project that public debt will reach an unprecedented level by 2027,” said Gene Dodaro, U.S. Comptroller General and head of the GAO. “We’re calling on Congress and the Administration to act now to develop and implement a strategy to address this acute challenge. Inaction could result in great difficulties for many Americans and impede policymakers’ flexibility to respond to future economic recessions or unexpected events.”
Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, said the group will continue to look for ways to reduce the deficit.
“I commend Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington on navigating a budget resolution through markup and setting up the Trump agenda for success,” he said. “RSC’s stated position is this process must reduce the budget deficit and we will continue to work with the Administration and designated committees to achieve additional savings.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.