 By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half of what it was before I took office. The only president ever to cut the deficit by more than $1 trillion in a single year. President Joe Biden's claim that he's responsible for the largest reduction in the federal deficit in history is, in short, bullshit. In the roughly 18 months since he took office, Biden's policies have only added to America's long-term budget deficit, which is getting worse and worse as government spending outpaces tax revenue. Let me remind you again, I reduced the federal deficit. All the talk about the deficit from my Republican friends, I love it, I reduced it $350 billion in my first year in office. And we're on track to reduce it by the end of September by another $1,500 billion, the largest drop ever. So what is Biden talking about? He's taking credit for expiring emergency spending measures. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government ran a $3.1 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2020, which fell to a $2.7 trillion deficit in 2021. Now that the pandemic spending is finally over, the deficit is expected to fall again to $1.4 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, though we won't have a final figure until the fall. Once we eliminate other outlier years like 1943 when the U.S. was participating in a global war, this year's budget deficit will likely end up as one of the largest in American history as a percentage of GDP. So Biden doesn't really have anything to brag about. Let me remind you again, I reduced the federal deficit. No, you didn't. As expiring COVID spending made our fiscal situation look better on the surface, Biden was busy adding $2.4 trillion to the long-term deficit, according to the CBO's most recent estimates. There was Biden's American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure package, and the $1.5 trillion federal budget that passed in March. If the president's multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better plan had somehow become law, as heritage analyst David Ditch has pointed out, we'd be in even worse shape. Before Biden took office, projected budget deficits through 2031 looked like this. And here's how they look a year and a half into his presidency. The federal government's budget is on the road to hell, warned former congressional budget office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin back in 2011. That was before Obama, Trump, and now Joe Biden each went on a spending binge that has made our fiscal future even less stable. Biden wants you to focus on just a small part of the overall picture. The deficit for the past two years and this year are a misleading indicator of America's overall fiscal health. And to claim that he's responsible for reducing the deficit is worse than misleading. It's an outright lie.