For about two-thirds of the time Ryan (R-Wis.) served as speaker, he enjoyed majorities by his party on both sides of Capitol Hill and a Republican president just up the road. And yet his signature policy achievement during that time of unified party control runs directly contrary to his oft-stated priority as a legislator — reducing the federal debt.

That policy achievement, of course, is the tax bill signed one year ago. Despite assurances offered by Republican leaders before its passage, the legislation is set to significantly increase the annual federal deficit over the next decade, thanks to its generous cuts to corporate taxes. (Ryan, for one, didn’t say the bill would pay for itself. Instead, he claimed not to know whether it would, despite plenty of evidence showing what was likely to happen instead.)

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In an interview last month, Ryan even lamented that he hadn’t been able to do more on government debt while in Congress. It’s a bit baffling, given how debt changed during his time in Washington, something we looked at in July: The federal debt grew by more than $2 trillion from the quarter when he started as speaker to the most recently available quarter.

By recent standards, that’s — not that high. It’s less than was added to the debt under his three immediate predecessors, for example.

But, then, he didn’t serve as long as those three speakers, either. As a function of his time in office, debt accrued during Ryan’s speakership at a rate exceeded by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the woman likely to replace him.

Of course, Pelosi also served in a moment when government spending spiked as a result of the recession.

As a function of total debt, the increase under Ryan (through the third quarter of 2018) was fairly modest — given that the starting point was so much higher than for any other speaker in the past 50 years. Here, the outlier is Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.). He was speaker when the debt soared during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

As a function of the annual gross domestic product, the increase under Ryan was also fairly modest by recent historical standards.

But, again, Ryan’s legacy will probably be less the increase in the federal debt while he served and more how the bill he helped pass last year changes the debt over the years to come. Pelosi comes into the leadership role as annual deficits continue to increase (as we documented last month).