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Opinion|We Both Served as Treasury Secretary. We Know This Bill Is Dangerous.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/opinion/republican-bill-fed-treasury-secretary.html
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Guest Essay
July 2, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
By Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers
Mr. Rubin and Mr. Summers, a contributing Opinion writer, were Treasury secretaries in the Clinton administration.
Donald Trump as a candidate promised his policies wouldn’t add to the debt. Before taking office, he vowed “to restore fiscal sanity to our nation.” His “big beautiful bill” does the opposite.
We served under a president who made that same vow — and who also took it seriously.
We were members of Bill Clinton’s economic team when the federal budget was balanced, the only time that has happened in more than half a century. In nearly every respect, the Trump administration’s approach is the opposite of what worked in the 1990s — and it poses huge risks to our economy.
There are important parallels between the two moments. Mr. Clinton then and Mr. Trump now face serious fiscal problems and an economy that is being rapidly changed by new technology; then it was the internet, now it’s artificial intelligence.
In that earlier era, we followed a strategy of hoping for the best, while planning conservatively. We paired policies that reduced the deficit with others that stimulated investment. That set off a virtuous economic cycle of growth, deficit reduction, lower interest rates and thus more investment and growth. Fiscal responsibility helped contain inflation because it was accompanied by respect for the independence of the Federal Reserve and recognition of the importance of a strong dollar.
This current administration risks putting this cycle in reverse by undermining the Federal Reserve, imposing tariffs and passing a tax and policy bill that is more budget busting than big and beautiful.
There are many reasons for concern about America’s fiscal position. The country’s debt is the same size as its entire economic output, and if this legislative package passes, it could grow to 135 percent or more, with an annual budget deficit equaling 8 percent of gross domestic product, by 2035. Inattention to the deficit is more serious now than it would have been during Mr. Clinton’s administration, when we were concerned about debt levels reaching a mere 65 percent of G.D.P. by 2000.
