Should the U.S. Government Be Required to Balance Its Budget?

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On March 18, 2026, the House voted 211 to 207 for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, and it still failed. It needed two-thirds of the House, and a bare majority was not enough.

The amendment, House Joint Resolution 139 (H.J. Res. 139), came from Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona. It would have capped each year’s federal spending at the average the government collected over the three years before, adjusted for inflation and population.

Whether a rule like that is wise turns mostly on its exceptions. A rule strict enough to hold Congress to balance could force tax increases or spending cuts in the middle of a recession, and a rule loose enough to bend for every emergency would do less to stop the borrowing it targets. That design choice, more than the goal of a smaller debt, is where supporters and opponents part ways.

What “balanced” would actually require

The federal budget runs a deficit when outlays exceed revenues in a fiscal year, and a surplus when revenues are larger. Outlays is the budget word for spending. Balance describes one year of money in and money out.

A rule also has to say which accounts count. There are three accounts designated in law as off-budget, meaning they are totaled separately from the rest of the budget: the two Social Security trust funds and the Postal Service Fund. H.J. Res. 139 answered part of that: paying down debt would not count as spending, and borrowing would not count as revenue. Leaving Social Security in or out changes how large the gap looks, so a balance rule has to settle that question in its own text.

How far the budget is from balance

In fiscal 2025, the deficit fell to $1,775.4 billion, from $1,816.8 billion the year before. Closing a gap that size in a single year would take very large spending cuts, very large tax increases, or some of both. The word “balanced” does not say which.

Debt held by the public is the total amount borrowed from the public by the federal government to cover its deficits over the years. At the end of fiscal 2025, debt held by the public was 99 percent of gross domestic product, the total value of what the economy produces.

The Government Accountability Office projects that share will keep rising, reaching 123 percent of the size of the economy in 2036. In fiscal 2025, the government spent more on net interest, the interest it pays on its debt minus the interest it earns, than on national defense.

Treasury’s long-term projections ask what it would take to keep debt from growing faster than the economy over the next 75 years, and the answer is cuts to non-interest spending and receipt increases that amount to 4.7 percent of GDP on average. That is a looser target than annual balance. A target like that allows deficits in some years as long as the debt does not outgrow the economy. Even that looser goal means real changes to taxes, benefits or both, and who bears them depends on what Congress picks.

A balanced year would not pay down the debt

A balanced year would add nothing to the debt. It would not shrink it either, and interest would still come due on all of it.

Old debt also has to be replaced as it matures. In August 2026, Treasury offered $125 billion in Treasury securities, enough to pay off about $96.3 billion in notes and bonds coming due and raise about $28.7 billion in new cash. Refinancing like that would continue under any balance rule, because a balanced year leaves the existing debt in place.

Congress already controls the budget

The Constitution gives Congress the power to tax and the power to borrow, and money can leave the Treasury only when a law provides for it. Each year, the president sends Congress a budget, and then Congress considers a budget resolution, spending bills and other laws that set the actual numbers. A balance rule would therefore bind Congress above all, since Congress makes the final decisions.

The debt limit, a cap on total federal borrowing, is not a balance rule. The tax and spending decisions that add to the debt can be agreed to by Congress and the president well in advance of any vote on the limit. By the time the limit comes up, the borrowing has already been decided.

Recessions and emergencies are the hard case

In a recession, federal spending rises and revenue shrinks without any new law. Economists call those swings automatic stabilizers. A strict annual rule would push Congress to cancel them out with tax increases or spending cuts, just as households and businesses are cutting back.

To spend more than the cap in a normal year, two-thirds of each chamber would have had to agree. Raising taxes would have needed two-thirds as well: any bill to levy a new tax or to increase the rate of any tax could not become law without two-thirds of each chamber. That left cutting spending as the only way to meet the cap in a downturn that a simple majority could pass.

Emergencies can move the numbers even faster. By July 31, 2020, Congress had passed four COVID-19 relief laws making appropriations of about $2.6 trillion. H.J. Res. 139 would have dropped the two-thirds requirement for any year in which a declaration of war is in effect, so an ordinary roll call vote would have been enough. A pandemic or a recession would still have needed two-thirds of each chamber.

Balanced-budget proposals most often allow extra spending if it is approved by a vote of three-fifths in each chamber. This amendment set its bar higher, at two-thirds. An exception that is easy to use weakens the rule. One that is hard to use can slow the response to a crisis.

The budget has balanced before, without an amendment

In 1990, Congress stopped chasing fixed deficit targets and shifted to limiting congressional actions that would increase the deficit. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, worked with a Republican-controlled Congress to eliminate the deficit. Clinton left his successor, George W. Bush, a $236 billion budget surplus, as Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee pointed out in their dissent from its report on H.J. Res. 139.

That record shows Congress and a president can balance the budget with ordinary laws. The surplus did not last, and that is the problem amendment supporters want a constitutional rule to solve.

What state budget rules show

Every state but Vermont has a balanced budget requirement, and Vermont usually balances its budget anyway. Those rules apply to the state operating budget and not to the capital budget. A capital budget pays for long-lived projects such as roads and buildings. In some states it is possible to roll a deficit forward from one year to the next, borrow for the short term, or use accounting moves to close a gap. Even in the Great Recession, states almost invariably balanced their budgets.

Budget standoffs in states can be painful. Minnesota had a particularly disruptive 20-day shutdown in 2011 that furloughed 19,000 state workers and closed state parks at the height of the summer travel season. New Jersey’s government shut down for three days in 2017, closing state beaches during the Independence Day vacation week.

States show that a balance rule shapes budget fights. They are an imperfect model, because their rules leave out capital spending and leave room for accounting choices that a single federal rule would have to settle.

The case for an amendment

On the day of the vote, House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, a Texas Republican, delivered remarks on the House floor in support of H.J. Res. 139. He told members the country had a national debt per GDP that exceeds World War II levels. Congress needed an amendment, he said, “to impose fiscal responsibility on a body politic that has not done that, that has not mustered the political will to do that.”

If Congress would not pass it, he urged advancing an Article V Convention of the States, the route the Constitution gives state legislatures to propose amendments themselves.

The House Judiciary Committee’s majority said a balanced budget would end the practice of saddling future generations with a large national debt, improve the economy by lowering the deficit, and increase citizens’ trust in political institutions.

Supporters point to past laws that failed to require balance, and argue that a constitutional amendment would be more binding by its nature. Their strongest point is about staying power: a law that one Congress passes, a later Congress can change or waive. As of April 2026, publicly held debt was $31.3 trillion, roughly the size of the whole economy. To supporters, every year without a binding rule is a year the debt keeps growing.

The case against an amendment

After the amendment failed, Representative John Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, said it would force deep cuts to programs across the federal government, including Social Security and Medicare. His statement did not put a size on the cuts. It named the programs he expected to be at risk.

Richard Kogan made the economic case against an amendment in a paper updated in March 2018. He concluded that an amendment would likely make recessions more frequent and more severe. His reasoning follows from how recessions work: when revenue falls and spending rises on its own, a strict rule forces cuts at the worst moment.

Opponents have also stressed the practical difficulties of enforcement, and the potential for judicial involvement. Allen Schick, a former Brookings Institution budget expert, testified on February 5, 1997, about the balanced budget amendment then before Congress. He warned that the courts might end up deciding both what the amendment means and what federal budget policy should be.

A rule cannot close a gap by itself. Someone still has to cut a program, raise a tax, vote an exception or argue over the accounting, and if Congress misses the target, a court could be asked to step in.

Where the amendment stands

On February 3, 2026, the House Judiciary Committee ordered H.J. Res. 139 favorably reported by a vote of 16 to 10. The March floor vote fell short, so the amendment did not go to the states.

An amendment proposed by Congress needs two-thirds of each chamber and then ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures. Even if it had been ratified, this one would have taken effect only in the fifth year after ratification. A balanced-budget amendment has come close before: in 1997, a Senate version was defeated by a vote of 66-34, having failed to reach the necessary two-thirds.

To tell your member of the House what you think of a future proposal, use the House’s Find Your Representative page to look up who represents your address. Any future version will face the same design choice as this one: how much room to leave for recessions and emergencies, and how many votes it should take to use it.