Donald Trump and top Republicans are going after the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), accusing the nonpartisan agency of lowballing economic growth and undermining their effort to sell a massive new round of tax cuts.
The GOP is pushing a bill in the House that would make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent — and add more on top of them. But estimates from the CBO and other economic forecasters show the plan could blow a multi-trillion-dollar hole in the federal budget. That hasn’t stopped Republicans from attacking the very people responsible for tallying up the numbers.
On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) claimed the CBO “is always off every single time when they project economic growth.” He insisted the new tax cuts “are going to reduce the deficit” and credited Trump’s 2017 tax law with delivering “the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
Trump, meanwhile, took to Truth Social on Friday to rage at the CBO.
“The Democrat inspired and ‘controlled’ Congressional Budget Office (CBO) purposefully gave us an EXTREMELY LOW level of Growth, 1.8 percent over 10 years — how ridiculous and unpatriotic is that!” he wrote.
“I predict we will do 3, 4, or even 5 times the amount they purposefully ‘allotted’ to us (1.8 percent)… with just our minimum expected 3 percent growth, we will more than offset our tax cuts (which will, in actuality, cost us no money!).”
But according to the CBO, that kind of growth simply isn’t realistic. Earlier this year, the office projected the U.S. economy would grow at an average rate of 1.8 percent annually for the next decade — the same figure used by the Federal Reserve and most major economic institutions.
The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), Congress’s other official scorekeeper, said the GOP’s tax proposal would barely nudge economic growth — by just 0.03 percentage points — over the next 10 years.
Still, Republicans are pressing forward and brushing off warnings. “They always underestimate the growth that will be brought about by tax cuts and reduction in regulations,” Johnson said, echoing a long-debunked claim.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said this type of attack on the CBO is nothing new.
“They love CBO when it gives them the score they want or it hurts their opponents, and they don’t like it when it tells them the hard truths about their own bill,” she said.
Economists say the math behind the GOP’s claims simply doesn’t work. After the 2017 tax law passed, the economy grew by just 0.2 percent in 2018 — not nearly enough to pay for the cost of the cuts. According to the Congressional Research Service, the law would’ve needed to grow the economy by 6.7 percent to fully offset the deficit it added.
Marty Sullivan, chief economist at Tax Analysts, put it bluntly: “Everybody in my profession agrees with me. Nobody — 99 percent of economists — believes that there’s going to be so much growth that it would offset any cost on any of these tax cuts.”
Other top forecasters backed this up: Goldman Sachs projected a 0.3 percent bump from the 2017 law. The IMF and Moody’s Analytics had similar outlooks. None of them were attacked by Republicans. The CBO, however, is taking the heat.
Critics also point out that the new GOP tax plan mostly extends provisions already set to expire — meaning the economic impact would likely be even weaker than in 2017. Economists say tax cuts can have a short-term boost, but that fades as businesses and households adjust.
The core fight is over how the bill is scored. Under current law, the 2017 tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. If they’re extended, and no new revenue or spending cuts are added, the GOP’s new tax package would add over $5.5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to the JCT.
Republicans argue the score should be based on “current policy” — assuming the 2017 cuts stay in place regardless — which would hide the true cost of the new plan.
Some Republicans are also pushing for deep spending cuts to pair with the tax plan. The House has already approved rollbacks to Medicaid, SNAP, and other safety net programs — cuts estimated to save over $1 trillion. Hard-liners want even deeper cuts, while some Senate Republicans are beginning to question the scale of the tax package.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of only two Republicans who voted against the bill, blasted the party’s reversal on fiscal responsibility.
“Why didn’t Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act make tax cuts permanent? Because the impact of the tax cuts on debt after 2025 was understood by THEM to be too great,” he posted on X. “Now they’re employing new-math to claim that renewing the tax cuts, without cutting spending, won’t impact debt.”
As the CBO prepares to release its final score this week, Republicans appear to be setting the stage to discredit it — not because it’s wrong, but because the numbers don’t fit the narrative.
