Bessent: FY2026 US Budget Deficit to Narrow Excluding Tariff Refund Effects

The signal here is about framing rather than arithmetic: the deficit is being presented as narrower only after stripping out tariff refunds, which implicitly treats those refunds as a distorting, non-structural item. That matters for anyone reading the US debt curve, since a 3% of GDP target is being floated as a meaningful anchor without any accompanying figure to test it against. The open question is whether that exclusion holds up if tariff refunds prove recurring rather than one-off, and whether the 3% reference point gains traction as a benchmark or remains rhetorical.