House Republican leaders are considering making some of the key tax benefits that President Donald Trump promised on the 2024 campaign trail only temporary policies in the reconciliation bill that's currently being crafted. A "sunset" period of four years is under consideration for policies such as eliminating taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime pay, Just the News has learned.

The move has drawn criticism from a budget watchdog group, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which has described the possibility of scoring certain tax benefits as temporary rather than permanent to estimate the full cost of the package as "manipulation" that wouldn't show the true cost.

Hiding the true cost of Trump's tax benefits

"This ad-hoc, inconsistent, manipulative, and disingenuous approach to budgeting is enough to make your head explode, and it is going to make the debt explode," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the CRFB.  

"Congress isn’t even pretending to do honest budgeting at this point. The whole argument behind the current policy baseline was that temporary policies should be counted as permanent – and yet here they are trying to count some of them as temporary," she added.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at CRFB, told Just the News that scoring those policies as temporary would hide the true costs of such tax benefits.

"It's completely hypocritical," he said. "You should still score it on a permanent basis if you believe in current policy, but they don't. They just believe in doing whatever is going to help them get their number. They don't care about current policy or current law."

Both parties have used budget reconciliation in past years, and they have included sunset provisions in legislation. What makes this situation unique, Goldwein explained, is that the GOP is considering making some policies permanent and others temporary within the same reconciliation bill and not scoring the cost of each over a 10-year period.

Cost as low as $5 trillion and as high as $11 trillion

"Things that are supposed to expire under law they're assuming are permanent, and so therefore, extending them is assumed to have no cost, even though it does," Goldwein said.  

He said the entire premise of a "current policy baseline" is to count "temporary things as permanent" to determine the true cost of legislation. 

Goldwein also said the GOP is considering counting "temporary things as permanent" when it helps lower the estimated cost of the bill, while counting "temporary policies as temporary" when making them permanent would increase the projected cost of the bill.

The CRFB has estimated that the full reconciliation package could cost as low as $5 trillion and as much as $11 trillion.

Just the News reached out to the House Ways and Means Committee to confirm that ending taxes on tips, Social Security benefits, and overtime pay will be temporary for 4 years, while other parts of the bill will be scored over a 10-year period.

"There are a lot of moving variables and negotiations are still ongoing amongst committee members, but the Chairman has been clear the President’s priorities will be included in any tax package the committee moves forward," a GOP spokesperson for the committee said.

When asked to confirm that the temporary timeframe under consideration is four years, the spokesperson said they "can’t speculate on the outcome of member deliberations on X or Y policy" given that "there are a lot of moving pieces and negotiations are still ongoing."