The federal government has spent more than it collected in every year but four since 1970. The Congressional Budget Office projects the gap will total $23.1 trillion between 2026 and 2035, averaging about 6.1 percent of the economy each year. That is roughly double the 3 percent generally treated as sustainable.
There is no shortage of proposals to fix it. The difficulty is arithmetic and trade-offs. Most of the cuts and tax changes that dominate public argument are worth tens of billions, while the shortfall runs to tens of trillions. Closing it means choosing among things people genuinely do not want.
So try. Every option below carries a real ten-year price tag from the CBO. Pick a target, start checking boxes, and see how far you get before you run out of things you are willing to do.
Every figure is a ten-year total for fiscal years 2026 through 2035, not an annual saving. The notes at the end explain where the numbers come from and how much weight they will bear.
Every figure is a ten-year total for fiscal years 2026 through 2035, not an annual saving. That matters: a $150 billion option saves roughly $15 billion in a typical year, not $150 billion. The original 1,345-square New York Times puzzle scored options against a single future year instead, which is why its numbers look so different from these.
The underlying estimates come from CBO’s Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034, published in December 2024, re-estimated onto the 2026–2035 window by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and rounded to the nearest $5 billion. A handful of Medicaid and revenue lines are CRFB’s own estimates rather than CBO’s.
The most important caveat: CBO scored these before the 2025 reconciliation act. CRFB flags that some options no longer apply in the form shown and others would score substantially differently today. Treat the amounts as the right order of magnitude rather than as current scores. CBO publishes a new compendium every two years, so a post-reconciliation edition is due.
The targets come from CBO’s February 2026 baseline, which projects $23.1 trillion in deficits from 2026 to 2035 and a 2026 deficit of $1.9 trillion, about 5.8% of GDP. Deficits average roughly 6.1% of GDP over the decade, so cutting them about in half gets to the 3% level usually treated as the sustainability threshold.
Three things the arithmetic here cannot capture. Options interact — a value-added tax changes taxable income, and capping Medicare payments shifts costs onto Medicaid and employer plans. Lower deficits mean lower interest costs, which this worksheet ignores, so a large package would save somewhat more than the sum shown. And where two options do overlapping work, they are grouped as choose-one; overlaps across sections are not policed, so a package that leans hard on both Medicare Advantage and Medicaid is probably double-counting at the margin.
Some Social Security lines are off-budget and, under current rules, cannot offset new spending or tax cuts in a reconciliation bill, though they do reduce projected deficits.
Sources: CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036; CBO, Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034; CRFB Budget Offsets Bank.