One yardstick, both parties.
HowMuchWeOwe attributes the deficit effect of enacted legislation to the members of Congress who voted on it. The dollar figures are not ours. They come from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the nonpartisan scorekeepers Congress itself relies on.
The tab
For each enacted bill with a CBO or JCT ten-year deficit estimate, we take the final-passage roll call in each chamber, the vote that sent the enacted text to the President. A yea adds the bill's ten-year deficit effect to the member's tab. A nay subtracts it. Bills that reduce deficits carry a negative figure, so voting for the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 subtracts $1.5 trillion and voting against it adds $1.5 trillion.
The tab is a net figure. A member can improve it with their next vote.
What counts
- Tax cuts count exactly like spending. A bill that reduces revenue without offsets adds to the deficit. This is CBO's convention and it is ours.
- Offsets count. Deficit reduction in a bill is netted against its costs, as in CBO's own total.
- Interest is shown, not added. Where CBO published debt-service effects separately, the bill page shows them. They are not in the tab.
- Current-law baseline. Where a bill was scored under competing baselines, we use CBO's current-law estimate and say so on the bill page.
- Score at passage. We quote the estimate available at the time of the vote. Later revisions are linked on the bill page but do not change the tab.
What doesn't count
- Annual appropriations and continuing resolutions. CBO scores them as budget authority, not deficit effect. They appear in the ledger with their votes but not in any tab.
- Procedural votes. Rules, cloture and motions to recommit are not scored.
- Voice votes. No roll call, no attribution. The CARES Act passed the House by voice vote; only senators carry it.
- Not voting. Zero effect. The count of missed scored votes is shown on the member page.
- Unverified figures. A bill whose dollar figure has not yet been tied to a CBO, JCT or CRFB document by URL is tagged "pending" and excluded from every tab until it is.
Coverage
Currently 20 scored bills from the 115th Congress (2017) onward, with a ledger total of 11.63 trillion dollars in ten-year deficit effects. The list is curated by hand from CBO's cost estimates and its annual reports on enacted legislation. We start with the bills large enough to matter to the total and extend backward over time. Scores were last computed 2026-09-02.
Data sources
- Debt, deficit, interest and rates: U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data (Debt to the Penny, Monthly Treasury Statement Table 1, Interest Expense on the Public Debt Outstanding, Average Interest Rates). The clock interpolates between daily postings using the trailing twelve-month growth rate and says so.
- Members: unitedstates/congress-legislators; portraits from unitedstates/images (public domain, sourced from the GPO Member Guide).
- Roll calls: the House Clerk and Senate XML, cross-checked against the Congress.gov API.
- Cost estimates: CBO, JCT, with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget as a cross-check.
- Per-person figures use the Census population estimate, IRS individual return counts and Census household counts noted in the source code.
Corrections and right of reply
Every number on this site links to the document it came from. If you believe a figure, a vote or an attribution is wrong, send the link and the correction to corrections@howmuchweowe.com. Corrections are logged publicly on this page. Members of Congress and their staff may submit a statement explaining a vote; it is linked from the member's page without edits.
Independence
HowMuchWeOwe is an independent project. It accepts no money from parties, campaigns, PACs or advocacy groups, endorses no one, and shows both parties with the same yardstick. The topic tends to attract partisans of every kind. The numbers do not care.