What portion of the $7.8 trillion increase is attributable to COVID‑19 emergency legislation versus tax cuts and baseline policies?

1. Two accounting frameworks — why they give different answers

The disagreement is not arithmetic so much as definition: one approach measures the incremental deficit impact of the emergency pandemic laws narrowly (the directly enacted COVID relief and emergency appropriations), while the broader approach aggregates all pandemic-era tax and spending changes (including large relief bills passed in 2020–21 and temporary program expansions) and compares those to pre-pandemic baselines; narrow CBO-style tallies show immediate-year deficit jumps of about $2.3 trillion in 2020 and $0.6 trillion in 2021 attributable to pandemic laws ^[5], whereas comprehensive trackers and policy analyses count multiple relief packages and estimate total pandemic-related tax cuts and spending hikes in the $5.1–$5.6 trillion range ^{[3] [4]}.

2. The “narrow pandemic” number: roughly $3.6–$3.9 trillion

Analysts who tabulate the ten-year budget impact of laws and executive actions tied much of the extra borrowing to the immediate COVID relief find about $3.6–$3.9 trillion attributable to pandemic relief—numbers repeated in the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s decomposition and in a Manhattan Institute summary that breaks the $7.8 trillion into roughly $3.9 trillion pandemic relief, about $2.0–$2.5 trillion from tax-cut legislation, and the rest from other spending increases ^{[1] [2]}. That narrower framing treats the CARES Act, Consolidated Appropriations, ARPA and related emergency programs as the principal pandemic drag on deficits while keeping the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and other pre-existing changes in a separate bucket ^{[1] [2]}.

3. The “broad pandemic” number: roughly $5.1–$5.6 trillion

By contrast, policy shops that add up all relief bills enacted across 2020–21 estimate total pandemic-related tax cuts and spending of about $5.1–$5.6 trillion—CBPP and the Tax Policy Center highlight five 2020 bills (~$3.3 trillion) plus the $1.8–$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in 2021, yielding a cumulative figure in that range ^{[4] [3]}. Under that broader convention, the pandemic accounts for roughly two‑thirds of the increase in the $7.8 trillion figure, because the pandemic-era package is treated as the dominant driver of new borrowing across the whole window ^{[3] [4]}.

4. Tax cuts and "baseline" policies — the other big slice

Independent decompositions allocate ~$2.0–$2.5 trillion of the $7.8 trillion increase to tax cuts enacted before and during the same period—most prominently the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—along with other non‑pandemic spending moves and discretionary cap increases that raised baseline deficits ^{[1] [2]}. Analysts emphasizing long-run structural effects note that permanent or long‑lived tax reductions (and extensions of temporary cuts) have an outsized, persistent footprint on the debt trajectory compared with one‑time emergency spending ^[6].

5. What this means and the reporting limits

The takeaway: if one isolates narrowly defined emergency COVID legislation, roughly 45–50% of the $7.8 trillion increase is attributable to COVID emergency laws (about $3.6–$3.9 trillion) with roughly 25–32% due to tax cuts (about $2.0–$2.5 trillion) ^{[1] [2] [5]}; if one absorbs all pandemic-era tax and spending actions into the COVID bucket, the pandemic’s share rises to about 65–72% (roughly $5.1–$5.6 trillion) and tax‑cut/baseline policies account for the smaller remainder ^{[3] [4]}. Sources differ because of scope (what counts as “pandemic” vs. “baseline”), time horizon (single-year CBO snapshots vs. ten‑year scored impacts), and whether interest and executive actions are included—those methodological choices drive the different portions reported by CRFB, CBO, Tax Policy Center, and CBPP ^{[1] [5] [3] [4]}.