“With the help of tariffs, we have cut that federal budget deficit by a staggering 27 percent in a single year.”

The Treasury Department's own books show the deficit fell 2.8 percent, not 27. The fiscal year 2025 deficit was $1.78 trillion, down about $50 billion from $1.83 trillion in fiscal 2024. Even the Republican-led congressional Joint Economic Committee headlined the result as a 2.8 percent decrease.

For Trump's math to work, the 2024 deficit would have had to be roughly $2.4 trillion, more than half a trillion dollars higher than it actually was. Trump's figure inflates the real oneyear reduction by nearly tenfold. And the trend is going the wrong way for his story: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected in February 2026 that the deficit will rise to $1.9 trillion in fiscal 2026 and reach $2 trillion or more by 2028, even with record tariff collections of $195 billion in fiscal 2025. "U.S. Deficit Decreases 2.8 Percent to $1.8 Trillion in FY2025" — U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (Republican majority), October 2025