Q: “Why Is the Deficit Increasing?” KJP: “Just Volatile”

On September 5, 2023, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre a simple question: why was the federal deficit increasing? Her answer — that deficits are “just volatile” — became one of the most widely mocked moments of her tenure, a single-word deflection that captured the White House’s inability to explain away the fiscal reality of the Biden presidency.

The Question and the Non-Answer

The exchange began with a Time magazine reporter asking about projections showing the federal deficit was on track to nearly double in fiscal year 2023. Jean-Pierre’s initial response was a familiar blend of talking points and evasion.

“Deficits from year to year can be volatile, and so that’s kind of how we have tracked that, but the reality is the president has a real plan, as we have laid out multiple times, to reduce the deficit,” she said.

The reporter followed up with the kind of direct question that Jean-Pierre struggled with throughout her time at the podium: “What is the reason it’s going up, though? Why is the deficit increasing?”

Jean-Pierre’s answer was circular: “I just said, it can be year to year — it can be very volatile.”

A reporter then asked the most basic follow-up possible: “Why?”

Jean-Pierre’s response was a verbal surrender: “Talk to an economist, and they can tell you specifically.”

The word “volatile” did extraordinary rhetorical work in this exchange. In financial and economic contexts, “volatile” describes fluctuations that are unpredictable and driven by market forces or external shocks. Jean-Pierre was applying the term to the federal deficit as though the government’s own spending decisions were somehow analogous to stock market swings — random, uncontrollable events that no one could be expected to explain.

What “Volatile” Was Hiding

The federal deficit was not increasing due to mysterious or unpredictable forces. The specific drivers were well documented and widely reported at the time of Jean-Pierre’s briefing.

First, federal spending had remained elevated even as pandemic-era emergency programs wound down. The Biden administration had pushed through significant new spending through the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and expanded student loan forgiveness programs. Each of these represented deliberate policy choices, not “volatile” fluctuations.

Second, interest costs on the national debt had surged. The Federal Reserve had raised interest rates aggressively throughout 2022 and 2023 to combat inflation that had reached 40-year highs. Higher rates meant the government was paying significantly more to service its $33 trillion debt. Net interest costs were projected to exceed $650 billion in fiscal 2023, an increase of roughly $200 billion from the prior year.

Third, federal revenues had declined. The post-pandemic tax revenue surge that had temporarily boosted government income in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 had normalized. Capital gains tax receipts fell as financial markets cooled, and some of the one-time revenue gains from pandemic-era business activity reversed.

Each of these factors was identifiable, quantifiable, and explainable. A prepared press secretary could have acknowledged them while arguing that the administration’s policies would yield long-term fiscal improvements. Instead, Jean-Pierre chose “volatile” — a word that obscured everything and explained nothing.

The $2 Trillion Projection

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget had projected that the fiscal year 2023 deficit, ending September 30, would reach approximately $2 trillion. This was nearly double the $1.4 trillion deficit of fiscal 2022 and triple the $984 billion deficit of fiscal 2019, the last pre-pandemic fiscal year.

The $2 trillion figure was significant because it placed the Biden-era deficit in historical context. Outside of the COVID-19 emergency years (fiscal 2020 and 2021), a $2 trillion deficit was unprecedented. It exceeded the peak deficits of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and was larger than the entire federal budget had been just two decades earlier.

For a president who claimed to be “fiscally responsible” and who regularly boasted of having reduced the deficit, the $2 trillion projection was devastating. It meant that the deficit reduction Biden cited — the decline from the pandemic peak — was not only misleading but had been completely reversed. The deficit was not just rising; it was returning to emergency-level territory during a period of peacetime economic recovery.

The “Fiscal Responsibility” Claim

Despite the deficit data, Jean-Pierre continued to insist that Biden was fiscally responsible. She recited the standard talking point: “The deficit has fallen more than $1 trillion under this president, and he has signed legislation to cut the deficit by another $1 trillion — so the president’s budget would reduce the deficit by a further $2.5 trillion by cutting wasteful spending on wasteful special interests and making big corporations and the rich pay their fair share.”

The claim that the deficit had “fallen more than $1 trillion” under Biden was technically accurate only if the comparison started from the pandemic peak of fiscal 2020, when emergency spending pushed the deficit above $3 trillion. This was the same accounting trick that Jean-Pierre relied on in every briefing where the deficit came up: compare current numbers to the worst year in history and claim credit for the inevitable decline as emergency spending expired.

Fact-checkers from multiple outlets had repeatedly flagged this framing as misleading. The Washington Post Fact Checker, CNN, and the Associated Press had all noted that Biden’s deficit reduction claims were primarily the result of pandemic programs expiring on schedule, not of new fiscal discipline imposed by his administration. Yet Jean-Pierre continued to use the same language, briefing after briefing, as though the critique had never been made.

The Deflection to Trump

Jean-Pierre’s pivot to blaming Trump followed the same script she used in virtually every briefing where Biden’s fiscal record was challenged: “By contrast, what you’re seeing from our Republican colleagues on the other side is that, you know — especially what President Trump and congressional Republicans, what they did during his administration is that they added $2 trillion to the deficit with a tax cut that obviously skewed obviously to the wealthy and large corporations.”

The reference was to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which reduced corporate and individual tax rates and was projected to add approximately $1.5 to $2 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Whether or not the critique of the Trump tax cuts was valid, it did not answer the question being asked. The reporter wanted to know why the deficit was increasing now, in 2023, under Biden. Pointing to a 2017 tax law signed by a different president was a non sequitur.

The deflection also carried an implicit contradiction. If Biden’s fiscal stewardship was so effective, why was the deficit higher in his third fiscal year than it had been in any of Trump’s pre-pandemic fiscal years? The 2017 tax cuts had been in effect throughout Trump’s presidency, yet the fiscal 2019 deficit was $984 billion — less than half the projected fiscal 2023 deficit under Biden.

Key Takeaways

On September 5, 2023, KJP described the federal deficit as “just volatile” when asked why it was increasing, then told a reporter to “talk to an economist” when pressed for specifics.
The fiscal 2023 deficit was projected to hit approximately $2 trillion, nearly double the prior year and triple the last pre-pandemic year, driven by elevated spending, surging interest costs, and declining revenues.
Jean-Pierre repeated the claim that Biden had reduced the deficit by $1 trillion, a figure based on comparing post-pandemic years to the emergency spending peak of fiscal 2020, which fact-checkers repeatedly flagged as misleading.
The word “volatile” was applied to the deficit as though the government’s own spending decisions were unpredictable market forces rather than identifiable policy choices.
Jean-Pierre deflected to Trump-era tax cuts rather than addressing the specific factors driving the deficit increase under Biden.

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