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WASHINGTON, July 24-- Several advocacy groups have criticized the two-year debt ceiling and budget deal recently reached between the White House and Congressional leaders, expressing grave concerns about the ballooning budget deficit in the United States. "Policymakers are dodging the hard policy decisions while adding hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit spending in the short-term and setting the stage for more than a trillion dollars added to the debt in coming years," the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan government spending watchdog, said in a statement Tuesday. "This budget deal and its fictitious offsets are really the Art Of The Steal from future generations," the group said. Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said the budget deal may end up being the worst in the nation's history. In a statement released on Monday, MacGuineas said this agreement, which as reached Monday, is "a total abdication of fiscal responsibility" by Congress and the White House, proposed at a time when "our fiscal conditions are already precarious." Echoing MacGuineas's remarks, Brandon Arnold, executive vice president of National Taxpayers Union, a conservative advocacy organization, said "this is a horrendous deal and a complete abdication of fiscal responsibility," calling on members of Congress to oppose the deal. The massive spending hike will blow through the caps put in place by the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011, which was signed by former President Barack Obama, Arnold said. "This deal puts the final nail in the coffin of the BCA." | 
