White House Slammed for Debunked Claim on Record Deficit Reduction – JONATHAN TURLEY

The White House has drawn the ire of the Twitter community by repeating President Joe Biden’s dubious claim that his administration had achieved a historical feat on budget reduction. The President often tells the public that he is responsible for the largest deficit reduction in history. It is a claim that has drawn widespread criticism in the past. Even The Washington Post balked and previously gave Biden “three Pinocchios” for the claim. The earlier spending and then sharp reduction were due to the pandemic, not Biden’s policies. Indeed, the reduction would have been far greater but for enormous spending by the Administration.

The White House posted a Tweet on Monday that said:

“The Biden-Harris Administration lowered the deficit with the single largest one-year reduction in American history.”

Twitter responded with a fact correction in a “Community Notes” section that:

“COVID-driven deficits in both FY20 & 21 were roughly double the previous record (09), making the drop to FY22 sizeable. But the FY22 deficit is still the 4th largest in history and is 41% larger than FY19.”

“Community Notes” is a program run by Twitter and allows readers “on Twitter to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading Tweets.”

Biden repeatedly takes credit for the fact that the annual federal deficit fell from $3.1 trillion in fiscal year 2020 to $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2022, a drop of $1.7 trillion. However, the truth is that he is responsible for a larger deficit than predicted.

In February 2021, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) already estimated that the budget deficit in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 would drop $3.31 trillion due to the fact that emergency COVID pandemic spending would lapse. That was before Biden’s spending plans were even submitted to Congress.

However, the deficits for 2021 and 2022 ended up totaling $4.15 trillion, according to the CBO. In other words, the deficits for those years were about $840 billion higher than expected due to the Biden-supported spending packages.

The White House correctly withdrew the Tweet, but the President continues to make such highly misleading claims.

Previously, the Washington Post gave President Biden a “bottomless Pinocchio” due to continued and regular false statements.