Good news! Republicans finally found a way to bring down costs. All it took was magically declaring expensive things to be free.

At least, that’s the lesson of their ginormous budget bill, whose Senate passage Tuesday required reinventing the laws of accounting.

There are many unpopular features in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill, including draconian cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, higher energy prices and trillions of dollars in additional debt. Both Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump seem to realize this, given that they’re jamming the bill through with little time for the media (and, by extension, voters) to catch up to what’s in it.

They’ve also spent recent weeks smearing the refs, including the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the professionals tasked with crunching numbers on the bill’s consequences. And on Sunday, Republicans hid from the Senate parliamentarian to avoid hearing her latest rulings about the cost of their bill.

On Monday, GOP lawmakers went a step further. As they had previously signaled they might do, they voted to stop pretending to care about what the bill costs or what the parliamentarian rules. Instead, they simply declared huge chunks of it to be free. Here’s how:

The package’s tax provisions alone would cost, on net, $4.5 trillion over the next decade. But Republicans said, “Eh, most of that tax package (about $3.8 trillion of it) shouldn’t really count as costing anything.”

That’s because Republican lawmakers had passed similar provisions in 2017, which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. Republicans argue that Americans got used to having that part of the tax code around. So extending these lower tax rates wouldn’t, you know, feel different.

As I’ve explained before, this is not how budgets work. It’s like saying renewing your Netflix subscription should count as free, because you got used to having the streaming service already. Or if your current car lease expires, getting a new one is now complimentary, because you already got used to the convenience of having a car.

Under this logic, it doesn’t matter if you’ve already allotted every penny of next week’s paycheck to other expenses (as Congress has). You don’t need to make room in your budget to pay for these goodies because you’ve gotten used to them.

The reason we’re discussing these arcane accounting acrobatics is that when Republicans first passed their regressive tax-cut package in 2017, they deliberately scheduled their tax cuts to “turn off” early, in 2025, rather than last forever. They did this to make the cost of what they were doing look smaller. What to do when those tax cuts expired - and how to pay for them - would be tomorrow’s problem.

Well, tomorrow has arrived. And GOP leaders’ solution is not just to cook the books; it’s to torch them entirely, by pretending their tax cuts were already baked into future budgets, when they deliberately weren’t.

Meanwhile, Republicans who should know better are outright lying to the public about what’s happening. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called himself a “fiscal hawk” and declared that “everyone believes this is a start” to reducing the national debt.

Most voters probably haven’t noticed these comments or might be more concerned about the prospect of losing their insurance. But you know who (or what) is paying attention? Bond markets.

For decades, U.S. Treasury instruments have been considered the safest assets to invest in. This was true even as we ran up enormous deficits without any plan to ever deal with them - which is not usually a feature of sovereign debt considered essentially risk-free. Nevertheless, investors around the world remained willing to lend us money on the cheap because no one questioned whether, ultimately, we would repay hem.

But the tide might be turning. In May, Moody’s, the last outstanding major credit agency that had still considered U.S. debt to be effectively riskless, finally downgraded it. Moody’s specifically cited the expectation that Congress would extend these costly tax cuts - the ones that senators are calling “free” - as a reason for its decision.

Shortly after, a routine auction for U.S. Treasury debt didn’t go so well. Fewer buyers than expected were interested in lending us money. At the time, this was widely interpreted as reflecting jitters about the One Big Beautiful Bill and the country’s swelling debt.

The Republicans’ accounting gimmick might seem obscure, but it sets a terrible precedent for how future Congresses will handle difficult budget choices.

Catherine Rampell is a Washington Post columnist.