MI-4 Priorities · Fiscal Responsibility

The deficit math behind the votes

A vote that adds to the national debt can be a deliberate tradeoff, and sometimes the alternatives cost more. Either way it should be counted, and weighed against whatever the member is actually doing to fix the underlying problem. Huizenga has done both: cast one of the largest deficit-increasing votes of his term, and put his own name on a bill meant to force Congress to confront exactly that kind of decision.

Last reviewed Sept. 25, 2026 · Corrections log

Relevant test: Long-Term Durability

Corrected Sept. 23, 2026: an earlier version said CBO's $3.4 trillion estimate for H.R. 1 included debt-service costs. It excludes them; including interest, CBO's figure is $4.1 trillion. The earlier version also gave $4.5 trillion as "CBO's dynamic estimate" of making the temporary provisions permanent. CBO's estimate, including interest, is $5.0 trillion, and it isn't a dynamic estimate. And it attributed $2.13 trillion in Fiscal Responsibility Act savings to CBO. CBO's estimate is $1.5 trillion; about $2.1 trillion was a high-end scenario from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The comparison in the paragraph below the figures has been updated to match.

Context: every dollar figure below comes from the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress's own nonpartisan scorekeepers, not from either party's messaging. CBO scores a bill's effect on the deficit relative to current law; it isn't a moral judgment; it's a number.

What the big votes actually cost

CBO scores

$4.1T

CBO's estimate of how much H.R. 1 (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, P.L. 119-21) adds to federal deficits over 2025–2034 including debt-service costs: $3.4 trillion from the law itself plus $718 billion in added interest. Huizenga voted yes twice.

Source: Congressional Budget Office, Aug. 4, 2025

$5.0T

What that figure grows to, including debt service, if the law's 10 temporary tax provisions are made permanent. JCT and CBO estimate those extensions would add $0.8 trillion more to deficits before interest.

Source: Congressional Budget Office, Aug. 4, 2025

$1.5T

Deficit reduction CBO estimated for the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act (the debt-limit deal) over 2024–2033, including $188 billion in lower interest costs, mostly from its caps on discretionary spending in 2024 and 2025. Like the $4.1 trillion figure above, it counts interest. Huizenga also voted yes on this one.

Source: Congressional Budget Office, May 30, 2023; June 2023

The first number is well over twice the third. Both are ten-year estimates, over windows that overlap but aren't identical. Counted together, H.R. 1 adds more to the debt than the Fiscal Responsibility Act was projected to save, and that's before accounting for the government-funding stopgaps in between, which mostly held spending flat rather than cutting or raising it. This isn't a case where the member never voted for fiscal restraint. It's a case where the restraint vote and the deficit-increasing vote both happened, on his watch, and the deficit increase was roughly 2.7 times the savings.

His own bill: the Fiscal Commission Act

His own bill, still pending

Huizenga is the lead sponsor, with Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) as the lead Democratic cosponsor, of the Fiscal Commission Act (H.R. 3289, introduced May 8, 2025), which would create a 16-member bipartisan, bicameral commission with a mandate to write a plan for the country's long-term fiscal trajectory and force an up-or-down vote on it. According to his office, the two co-chair the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum. It was reintroduced with an evenly bipartisan group of 28 cosponsors and has since grown to about 40, according to Congress's bill-status data. It has been referred to the Budget and Rules committees and hasn't had a markup or floor vote. In my assessment, it's the opposite of a headline-driven bill: slow, procedural, and aimed at a problem that won't fully materialize during this term or the next, which is the kind of long-horizon work this piece asks about.

An earlier version of the bill (H.R. 5779) was approved 22–12 by the House Budget Committee in January 2024 but didn't reach the floor. Two related 2025–26 measures point the same way. In January 2026 he introduced the 3% Resolution (H.Res. 981) with Reps. Peters, Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), and Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), expressing support for holding deficits to 3% of GDP. In October 2025 he joined Rep. Peters, the sponsor, in introducing the No Budget, No Pay Act (H.R. 5755), which would withhold members' pay when Congress misses budget and appropriations deadlines. Neither has had committee action. In August 2026, after the debt passed $40 trillion, he and other members of the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum issued a joint statement warning about it (his office, Aug. 20, 2026). None of these measures would change deficits by itself; they're about the process for deciding.

What's not measured yet: a comprehensive tally of every deficit-relevant vote across his full MI-4 tenure, and a running total rather than these three data points. That's a bigger project than this initial version covers. Two healthcare votes with their own CBO scores are covered in Healthcare & Coverage: his vote against extending the enhanced ACA premium credits, which CBO estimated would add $80.6 billion to deficits over 2026–2035, and his vote for a Republican alternative CBO estimated would reduce them by $35.6 billion. See Methodology for the sourcing rules, or the Priorities index for the rest of this section.