Federal deficit isn't shrinking; it's growing

President Donald Trump hasn't kept his promise to quickly balance the federal budget. In fact, on his watch, it's going in the opposite direction.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the preliminary federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2018 was $782 billion. That was $116 billion more than the $666 billion shortfall in fiscal year 2017.

And the most recent CBO projection for fiscal year 2019 shows a deficit of $981 billion. Each year from 2020 to 2028, the CBO projected, the deficit would top $1 trillion annually.

This state of affairs was not divorced from actions taken by Trump himself, analysts say.

The two biggest drivers of the projected increase in the 2019 deficit were the Republican tax bill and the bipartisan agreement on federal spending, both of which Trump signed.

In the spending legislation, Democratic and Republican lawmakers largely agreed to increase outlays in a wide variety of areas, including defense spending. That came after a period under President Barack Obama and the Republican-led Congress when across-the-board spending constraints known as sequestration curbed the growth of federal spending.

Here's how the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group that's hawkish on the deficit, broke down the contributors to the projected budget deficit for fiscal 2019. The analysis factors in the positives — the economic growth — as well as the budgetary negatives expected from the legislation he signed. The tax bill is shown in green, while the spending bill is in shown purple.

"I don't think he's kept to any definition of shrinking the deficit quickly," said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "It's only gotten more out of balance. It was not completely his doing — it was already projected to rise — but a large share of the increase comes from what he signed into law."

The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

On Trump's watch the annual deficit has expanded rather than shrunk. We rate this Promise Broken.