The boost to the national debt from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax bill could add fresh fuel to inflation just as his tariff policies are already pushing prices up, mainstream economists are warning. Those concerns echo worries among lawmakers — and fierce criticism from erstwhile Trump adviser Elon Musk — that the measure would cause too much new government borrowing.

Former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who was among the first to warn that pandemic-era stimulus measures in 2021 would spark inflation, said price increases could worsen if Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” became law.

The massive tax and budget proposal, which Congress’s nonpartisan bookkeeper says would add more than $3 trillion to the national debt in the next decade, combined with the president’s trade war, would put the U.S. economy on “the foothills of stagflation and possible financial crisis,” Summers told The Washington Post. The bill, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives last month, is in the Senate for debate.

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Criticism of the GOP bill has picked up in recent days among Republican lawmakers, Wall Street investors — and even Musk, who last week called the measure “a disgusting abomination” that would lead to “crushingly unsustainable debt.”

The national debt, at $36.2 trillion, is more than the economy’s yearly output, as measured by gross domestic product. Economists pay close attention to the relationship between the debt and GDP, which is one indicator of how easily a country can pay back what it owes.

“From a tax policy point of view, we know [this bill is] going to make the fiscal outlook worse; the only question is how much worse,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office and senior economic adviser to President George H.W. Bush. “We already had a bad fiscal situation, and it will be worsened by this, which means a little more crowding out, a little more pressure on interest rates.”

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The White House said the CBO’s assessment did not offer a full picture of the administration’s efforts. New tax cuts on tips and overtime, as well as business investments and additional revenue from new tariffs would jump-start growth and help reduce the deficit, said Stephen Miran, chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

“It’s surprising to me that the same ‘Chicken Littles’ are pulling the same act again, shouting that the sky is going to fall. There’s a lot going on in this administration that’s going to boost economic growth,” Miran said. “Tax relief, deregulation, energy abundance — this is the exact same set of policies from the president’s first term.”

The office of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) did not respond to emails seeking comment.

A spike in the national debt can be enough to boost inflation on its own, economists say. Every 1 percent increase in the national deficit as a share of GDP translates to price increases of roughly $300 to $1,250 per household over five years, according to estimates from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

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A jump in the deficit-GDP ratio also raises the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government, which trickles down to consumers and businesses in the form of higher interest rates. A 1 percent increase in the ratio would amount to extra annual interest costs of $60 for car loans, $600 on the typical mortgage and $1,000 for small business loans after five years, the Budget Lab found. After 30 years, the premium is even higher — adding $2,300 per year to the typical mortgage, for example.

“It is big, but it is not beautiful,” Summers said of the bill. “We need deficit reduction, not deficit expansion. Deficits have never been nearly this high at full employment, except in the context of wars, when they have led to inflation.”

Miran blamed the Biden administration for adding to the deficit, saying “it unfortunately left us with a very bad hand.” Trump’s policies, he said, would “durably bring down inflation” and lower borrowing costs for the government. Bringing interest spending down to where it was before the pandemic, he said, would save more than $3 trillion over 10 years.

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Concern over the country’s debt load has bubbled up in recent weeks. Moody’s Ratings last month stripped the United States of its top credit grade, citing “persistent, large fiscal deficits.”

That downgrade added to jitters in the bond market that began when Trump announced larger-than-expected tariffs in April, a decision that sent investors fleeing not just from stocks but also from the dollar and Treasury notes, which are normally seen as safe havens during market stress and volatility.

“When I see a pattern emerging where yields rise even as stocks are falling, that is alarming to me,” Summers said, adding that he thinks there’s a chance the U.S. economy could slip into recession in the coming months.

Summers, who served as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration until 2001, was also an economic adviser to President Barack Obama and helped shape the government’s response to the 2007-2009 Great Recession. He was also a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan of 2021, arguing that the $1.9 trillion stimulus effort helped fuel the worst inflation in decades.

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The inflation rate, which peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, has fallen to 2.3 percent as of April.

But other economists argue the GOP bill would jump-start economic growth and help ease inflation. Rolling back the Biden administration’s tax credits for solar and wind energy projects, for example, could lower electricity prices across the economy by encouraging investment in cheaper natural gas energy, said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist who worked in the Reagan, both Bush and the Trump administrations.

“These provisions might seem very small, but they will lead to lower inflation and increased economic growth,” said Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “We want to make our economy the best place in the world for people to work and invest and bring their manufacturing, and this bill achieves that.”

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Still, many economists argue the president’s sweeping tariffs are likely to have a larger impact — at least immediately — on the U.S. economy than the proposed fiscal legislation. Trump’s aggressive rollout of new taxes on billions of dollars’ worth of imports has already resulted in higher costs for businesses and consumers. Summers said the mix of Trump’s fiscal policies and tariffs could stoke price increases that rival or even surpass pandemic-era inflation.

“The inflation risks all depend on tariff policies,” he said. “If the planned tariffs were allowed to go into effect after 90 days, and we had this fiscal expansion, and we beat on the Fed and continue to denigrate the dollar, the inflation risks could easily match or exceed those of the early 2020s.”

Summers added it’s unclear just how the administration’s policies will play out. Much of that depends on whether Trump sticks to his most draconian trade policies, including triple-digit tariffs on Chinese goods that have been temporarily scaled back. Summers noted Trump has been open to “backing off of bad ideas.”

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The outlook got even murkier last week, after the president doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which are likely to raise the cost of cars, appliances, canned food and many other items. In addition, Trump has threatened 50 percent tariffs on the European Union and said he would place import taxes of “at least” 25 percent on Apple if the company doesn’t manufacture its products in the U.S.

“For this to become a serious inflation problem, we would need the president to persist on many of his erroneous instincts,” Summers said. “I hope the Senate will bring the president to his senses and he will back off the big, beautiful bill.”