Fact Check: President Joe Biden Claims He Slashed the Deficit by $1 Trillion

CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed during his Thursday State of the Union address that he “cut the federal deficit by over one trillion dollars.”

VERDICT: Misleading. Biden is only measuring his deficit cut against his own deficit spending.

Biden said during his speech:

I’ve been delivering real results in a fiscally responsible way.

I’ve already cut the federal deficit by over one trillion dollars.

I signed a bipartisan budget deal that will cut another trillion dollars over the next decade.

And now it’s my goal to cut the federal deficit $3 trillion more by making big corporations and the very wealthy finally pay their fair share.

Biden’s first year of deficit spending, 2021, was $2.75 trillion. The next, 2022, was $1.375 trillion, and 2023 was $1.695 trillion.

While it is true that the deficit went down after Biden’s first year in office, as Breitbart News has explained before, this is largely due to the end of stimulus spending from the coronavirus pandemic era and that government revenues increased.

“A 2022 CBO report found that the large decline in the federal deficit mainly came from government revenues increased in all categories, especially from individual income taxes. The CBO also detailed how coronavirus-era expenditures, including coronavirus aid, stimulus checks, and small-business loans, declined,” Breitbart News wrote.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave Biden “three Pinocchios” when the 46th president took credit for reducing the deficit:

Biden is citing real deficit-reduction numbers, but doing so in a way to mislead listeners.

The president is leaving out important context. The budget deficit was supposed to shrink as the massive spending caused by the pandemic faded.

Maya McGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in 2023, “The White House is knowingly twisting the facts to tell a very different story than a fair and accurate one.”

Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.