Scott bill would add interest costs to CBO estimates

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(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., wants federal budget scorekeepers to include the cost of servicing the public debt in every estimate, which he says would give taxpayers a fuller picture of what bills actually cost.

Scott introduced S.5442 on Sept. 17. The measure has been referred to the Senate Budget Committee. Its text, released Sept. 24, would add a new section to the Congressional Budget Act requiring the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation to include the cost of servicing the public debt in any estimate, "to the extent practicable." The bill carries the same short title, the Cost Estimates Improvement Act, as a companion measure from U.S. Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas.

The federal government ran a $2 trillion deficit in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2026, and net interest on the public debt topped $1.02 trillion over the same period, according to Treasury Department data. Dividing that net interest figure across the about 162.8 million individual income tax returns the IRS processed in fiscal 2025, the most recent year available, The Center Square calculated that net interest alone works out to more than $6,200 per return.

Cloud has introduced the measure, the Cost Estimates Improvement Act, in every Congress since 2019, six times across four Congresses, and it has never become law. His furthest advance came in May 2024, when the House Budget Committee voted 17-7 to report an earlier version favorably, and it stalled before reaching the floor. He reintroduced the current version, H.R.10327, on Sept. 10.

Both bills would apply broadly. Scott's text says the debt-servicing requirement covers "any estimate" prepared by CBO under the relevant section of the Congressional Budget Act, as well as any estimate prepared by the JCT, "to the extent practicable."

Cloud's existing bill carries the same scope, a departure from his 2024 version, which covered only certain committee-approved estimates, about 100 to 120 a year.

When that narrower 2024 version cleared committee, CBO estimated it would cost essentially nothing to implement, no effect on the deficit and only a negligible administrative expense, saying it would take "few additional resources."

"We're $40 trillion in debt," Scott told The Center Square in a statement. "The American people deserve fiscal sanity and transparency with their tax dollars. Requiring CBO to factor record high interest rates into their calculations will give lawmakers and the American people a better, more transparent understanding of just how expensive Congress' spending sprees actually are. This bill is a necessary first step on the long road to getting America's finances back on track."

Cloud's office told The Center Square it was aware of Scott's bill before it was filed and worked with Scott's team to align the bill text. Cloud views S.5442 as a companion to his own bill, his office said, and he expects the Senate Budget Committee to take it up.

"Congress has a duty to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. That starts with having complete information," Cloud told The Center Square in a statement. "My Cost Estimates Improvement Act is a common-sense fix. Official budget estimates must include the full cost of government spending, including the cost of servicing our national debt. With interest payments already topping $1 trillion a year, this change is long overdue. I look forward to the Budget Committee taking this up and advancing it before the end of the year."

Chris Towner, policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said his organization has long backed adding debt-service costs to CBO scores and doesn't consider it a heavy lift.

"CBO has already basically said they can do it pretty quickly," Towner told The Center Square, noting the office already provides a public tool to calculate interest costs on similar proposals.

Towner said the added interest typically runs "somewhere around a fifth" of a bill's cost over 10 years when left unoffset, a figure roughly in line with the 25% estimate Brookings' Jessica Riedl gave The Center Square when Cloud reintroduced his bill in September.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former CBO director, said adding a debt-service line to every score is technically simple for the office but likely wouldn't reshape most legislative debates.

"I don't think it's going to change things dramatically," Holtz-Eakin told The Center Square. "Most pieces of legislation are not large enough to really significantly impact the line item on the interest." He said the exception would be unusually large bills, such as the tax-and-spending package Congress passed in July 2025, "The One Big Beautiful Bill Act."

Holtz-Eakin also noted a technical wrinkle: scoring interest bill by bill doesn't add up neatly to what the government actually pays, since interest rates move with the total amount the government borrows, not with any single bill.

"Individually you don't change the interest rates, but if you borrow a lot, you do," he said. He added that combining a bill that reduces the deficit with others that increase it can erase any interest savings the first bill would show. Still, Holtz-Eakin said he sees little risk the new numbers could be manipulated.

"There's no new gaming," he said, adding that a debt-service line would likely draw the same complaints CBO already gets over the accuracy of its interest-rate forecasts.

Riedl told The Center Square in September that the harder question may not be whether to measure the interest cost, but what to do once it's visible, since requiring Congress to offset costs a bill would newly reveal is likely to run into resistance.

"Many lawmakers surely won't want that additional requirement," she said.

Neither Scott's bill nor Cloud's addresses offsets directly; both would only change what shows up on the estimate.

The office of Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., did not respond to a request for comment on S.5442.