The Democrats Have a Lot of Cutting to Do

To win over their most centrist members, the Democrats will need to fit all their wishes into the smaller box.

As Democrats in Congress debate how to pare back their big social spending bill — to a total budget increase of less than $2 trillion over a decade — they have even farther to go than it may appear.

The Congressional Budget Office has said it is “unclear when” it will provide official estimates for the entire proposal written by the House last month. So we’ve turned to what several budget experts say are the best available estimates of the cost of everything in the bill, compiled by Don Schneider, an economist at Cornerstone Macro. The figures, detailed in the tables below, show that lawmakers’ starting point is far higher than the $3.5 trillion number they had used to describe the package initially.

All the new spending and new tax cuts and credits in the bill add up to closer to $4.7 trillion over a decade, the result of an ambitious agenda and some optimistic thinking about the pricetag. The target number President Biden discussed with lawmakers this week would be less than half as much, an effort to win the votes of reluctant centrist Democrats. Lawmakers have also proposed a series of tax increases and spending cuts to substantially offset those costs.

Wherever possible, Mr. Schneider used numbers from the official scorekeepers — the C.B.O. or the Joint Committee on Taxation. Some of the other figures were provided by House committee fact sheets or were estimated based on official scores of similar legislation.

Mr. Schneider was a Republican congressional staffer before taking his current job, and he personally has concerns about the budgetary effects of the legislation. But he said his estimates were not intended to exaggerate the costs of the bill, but to help investors understand the possible effects of the legislation.

“I’m serving market participants,” he said. “This is my best guess of what it is.”

Families

Democratic leaders have signaled that programs to help children and families will be a major focus of the legislation, and the House bill includes a number of such policies. The child tax credit was written as a near-universal policy of monthly payments to parents with children for four additional years. A program would subsidize child care for families that use it. Another would help states establish pre-kindergarten classes in public schools. The legislation would expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to provide paid leave to workers when they need to miss work because of childbirth or family illness.

Together, these proposals could use up the entire White House budget for the bill: $1.9 trillion, according to the estimates. To reduce the cost, Democrats could pare the number of family programs, or make them temporary. They could also make policy changes to reduce their generosity, such as capping eligibility for some programs at a lower income threshold. Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat whose vote is required to support the package, has requested income cutoffs and work requirements for some of the family programs. Paid leave could be narrowed by reducing the number of weeks workers are paid for medical leave.

Some progressive lawmakers strongly prefer trimming the package by preserving more policies but shortening their timeline, a bid to demonstrate their value and encourage their renewal. Other Democrats prefer selecting a few key programs and making them permanent — to make them harder to kill. In meetings with Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, President Biden said the child tax credit might need to be extended for only one year, not the four imagined by the House bill. But he vowed to preserve the pre-K funding. Mr. Manchin has said Democrats should select just one of the family policies, rather than including them all.

Health care

The House bill would expand health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act through enhanced subsidies for people who buy their own insurance and a new federal program for low-income people in states that did not expand Medicaid. Other major health provisions would extend dental, vision and hearing benefits to those with Medicare; and expand funding for home health aides for older and disabled Americans. On Tuesday, the C.B.O. released its first estimates for the coverage provisions of the bill. The estimates for other health policies remain hazy.

Health care spending plans, with a total price around $1 trillion, are likely to be cut. House Democrats who favor the Medicaid expansion are battling with key Senate Democrats who favor the Medicare benefit expansion. Lawmakers could also tinker with the structure and timetables of the programs, by having them start later; end earlier; cover fewer high-income Americans; or pay for slightly different benefits.

Climate

The bill’s most ambitious provision to battle climate change would need to overcome Mr. Manchin’s strong opposition. The Clean Electricity Performance Program is meant to shift power plant production away from coal and natural gas and toward sources that do not produce greenhouse gasses. Mr. Manchin, who represents coal-producing West Virginia and has personal financial ties to the industry, has told the White House the proposal goes too far. But other climate provisions, including tax credits for renewable energy, still total more than $450 billion, according to estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation and Mr. Schneider.

The House Progressive Caucus is fighting to preserve the climate measures in the bill, arguing that another piece of pending legislation, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, invests in forms of transportation that tend to increase carbon emissions. To address climate change through other means, the caucus is looking for ways to repurpose the $150 billion originally designated for the power plant program.

Education, jobs and other programs

One program in this area — an immigration proposal to allow so-called Dreamers to achieve legal status — will need to be removed from the package. The Senate parliamentarian has said such a measure, as written by the House, does not follow the rules for a budget bill. Lawmakers are also examining education programs for trims. President Biden told lawmakers on Tuesday that a plan to offer free community college tuition might need to be eliminated.

Paying for the bill

Democrats have vowed that the bill will be fully financed, a promise that suggests they will offset all their new spending and tax cuts with new taxes and government revenues or cuts elsewhere in the budget. But the language of the budget would allow them to pass a bill that increases the federal deficit by as much as $1.75 trillion under official estimates.

In reality, lawmakers are likely to employ a mix of so-called pay-fors that government scorekeepers say will save money, and other measures that lawmakers believe will generate additional savings, such as increased I.R.S. enforcement. The bulk of the financing is likely to come from increases in income tax rates on high earners and corporations. But a sizable chunk may also come from new regulations on the price of prescription drugs — a change that could save Medicare and patients money. A second, more technical change to Medicare, which would cancel a pending regulation, could generate savings on paper without changing current policy.

Some centrist lawmakers have balked at the proposed tax increases.

While these figures for the budget proposal exceed the original estimate by a lot, the Democrats who are trying to shrink the bill are working with the C.B.O. behind the scenes to gauge the costs of various options. That means they are unlikely to be surprised by the cost of their final package. But the public may have to wait to find out what lawmakers already know.