©️ Associated Press | Patrick Semansky
Republicans are using Congress’s official budget scorer as a whipping boy as they argue a major package of Trump’s tax priorities advancing in Capitol Hill is costless, write The Hill’s Aris Folley and Tobias Burns.
Multiple projections, however, place the plan’s price tag at trillions of dollars over the next decade. While the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has yet to release a final estimate of Republican’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Republicans have increased the attacks on the nonpartisan office over its cost projections of the party’s tax cuts plan — which seeks to permanently lock in expiring provisions in Trump’s 2017 tax plan, along with a host of other add-ons.
“The CBO sometimes gets projections correct, but they’re always off every single time when they project economic growth,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — on a mission to sell the bill to his own party — said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” asserting the bill “is going to reduce the deficit.”
Politico: Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) on Monday vowed not to overrule the parliamentarian on the pending budget bill.
Trump on Monday emphasized that he wants the bill on his desk before the Fourth of July.
“With the Senate coming back to Washington today, I call on all of my Republican friends in the Senate and House to work as fast as they can to get this Bill to MY DESK before the Fourth of JULY,” Trump said in a lengthy post selling his megabill.
The CBO won’t release a final growth projection for the GOP bill until later this week. However, the agency projected earlier this year that real gross domestic product will grow at an average rate of 1.8 percent annually over the next decade if current law remains unchanged.
Economists, meanwhile, are questioning the GOP bill, which — contrary to typical spending patterns — would add trillions to the national debt at a time when unemployment is low and the economy is solid by most measures. Experts warn that could make it harder to respond to future crises.
“I’m extraordinarily concerned about the fiscal implications of this,” David H. Romer, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times. “We’re starting from high levels of debt, high levels of deficits, projected growing budgetary pressure from an aging population. And the investors are already jittery about this, so this is not just hypothetical.”
