The 2025 Mid-Session review
By Shalanda Young
OMB released the 2025 Mid-Session Review (MSR) today, updating the Administration’s March budget estimates to account for economic, technical, and legislative updates in the months since. The MSR also updates the Administration’s economic projections released in March to account for more recent data.
The 2025 MSR continues to underscore our Nation’s economic comeback under President Biden. Since the Budget was released in March, we have maintained consistent job growth and have now created a record 15.7 million jobs since the President took office, including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs. Inflation is down two-thirds since its peak, while wages for middle-wage workers have risen faster than prices 16 months in a row, and lower-wage workers have seen the strongest wage increases during this recovery. The benefits of this economic comeback have been shared broadly — for example, a record share of working-age women and people with disabilities have had jobs in recent months and labor force participation among working-age adults is at a 22-year high as Americans continue to come off the sidelines and seize new opportunities.
Once again, the economy has outperformed expectations — with stronger growth in the first quarter of this year than projected in the Budget. Based on this stronger-than-expected growth, the MSR projects higher real GDP growth rates and lower unemployment rates for both 2024 and 2025 compared with the Budget.
These economic gains are no accident — they have come in no small part due to the investments President Biden has made since taking office: jumpstarting the recovery through the American Rescue Plan; building roads and bridges, replacing lead pipes, expanding high-speed Internet, and more through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law; investing in clean energy jobs and industries of the future, and lowering prescription drug and energy costs through the Inflation Reduction Act; and making “Made in America” a reality by bringing high-tech manufacturing jobs back to the United States through the CHIPS and Science Act. These investments have come alongside measures to put our Nation on a more fiscally responsible path. Aided by the stronger economy, the deficit is now more than $1 trillion lower than when President Biden took office. On top of that, President Biden signed into law another roughly $1 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade through measures in the the Fiscal Responsibility Act and Inflation Reduction Act, including empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, making billion-dollar corporations pay a minimum tax, and providing the IRS with the resources it needs to crack down on wealthy tax cheats.
The President’s Budget builds on that progress, reducing the deficit by over $3 trillion over the next decade. It does so by cutting wasteful spending on special interests and making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share — all while lowering housing and health care costs, cutting taxes for families and working Americans, and making responsible and forward-looking investments in communities across the country. That approach is in stark contrast with measures put forward by Congressional Republicans that would increase the deficit by $5 trillion by extending the Trump tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and large corporations and by reversing Medicare’s ability to negotiate lower drug prices — all while making working families pay the price with deep cuts to Social Security, education, clean energy, health care, and other vital programs.
President Biden’s leadership has taken us from a period of economic crisis to one of sustained and shared prosperity — one in which communities that have been previously left behind by the failure of trickle-down economics are now making a comeback. But there’s more to do. The President and his Administration have laid out an agenda that will continue to lower costs and grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up while responsibly reducing the deficit. As we take stock of our progress to date and look toward the future, we will continue to take action to deliver for working families and ensure the opportunities of tomorrow are made here in America.
