Trump Allies Try to Discredit Experts Warning About the Cost of Tax Cuts

Even before House Republicans learned the full price of their tax package on Wednesday, one of the bill’s chief authors, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, was sowing doubt about the accuracy of the estimate.

“I’m skeptical,” Mr. Smith quipped at an event last month when asked about the coming analysis of the legislation’s cost. “Unless I like the number, I’m against the number.”

In the bitter war over the nation’s fiscal future, President Trump and his Republican allies have united around a new foe: the economists and budget experts who have warned about the costs of the party’s tax ambitions. Republican leaders have set about trying to discredit any hint of unfavorable accounting on their signature legislation as they race to enact it before the president’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.

The latest estimate arrived on Wednesday, projecting that the sprawling bill endorsed by Mr. Trump could add about $2.4 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade.

By then, though, the package of tax, spending and welfare cuts had already ignited an intense wave of political attacks and recriminations. While Republicans scrambled to cast their proposal as fiscally responsible, Wall Street was getting the jitters about the nation’s growing debt burden. The tech executive Elon Musk, having left behind his role seeking to slash government spending for Mr. Trump, savaged the bill again on social media on Wednesday, calling for new legislation to be drafted that “doesn’t massively grow the deficit.”

Most economists — from nonpartisan government watchdogs as well as outside tax analysts across the political spectrum — have concluded that the bill passed by House Republicans, which is now being considered by the Senate, could exacerbate the nation’s fiscal imbalance while contributing less in economic growth than Mr. Trump forecasts.

But party leaders have rejected those assessments, choosing to present a rosier interpretation of their bill. They reserved their fiercest criticism for the Congressional Budget Office, a team of nonpartisan aides who helped to author the price check issued on Wednesday. Mr. Trump and his advisers have tried to paint the budget office as historically inaccurate and overly political.

The attacks are hardly novel. Democrats and Republicans alike have long sniped over official cost estimates in bids to defend their legislation. Nor have the Congressional Budget Office and its peers always offered accurate predictions about the permutations of legislation and the ways in which those changes could alter the trajectory of a complex economy over time.

But the Republican criticisms have taken on greater significance under Mr. Trump, whose administration broadly has looked to undercut experts in Washington while raising the odds that the party could advance a bill without a full reckoning of its costs.

“By trying to sort-of game the referee on these questions, members of Congress are going to miss the fundamental issue of whether this bill is an appropriate response, given where we are with the deficit and debt,” said Jonathan W. Burks, the executive vice president for economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, who previously served Republicans including former Speaker Paul Ryan.

A spokeswoman for the Congressional Budget Office, which is run by Phillip L. Swagel, an economist who served under President George W. Bush, declined to comment.

A spokesman for Mr. Smith, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, declined to comment.

The Republican bill extends many of the tax cuts Mr. Trump enacted in 2017, while advancing some of his new campaign promises, such as his pledge to end taxes on tips and overtime. To pay for these ambitions, Republicans proposed more than $1 trillion in spending cuts targeting a range of antipoverty programs.

But the cuts alone do not offset the total price of the bill, according to congressional findings, which align with other forecasts.

The Budget Lab at Yale, for example, found the Republican proposal could add $2.4 trillion to the debt by 2034. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated it would raise deficits by $2.8 trillion over a 10-year period. And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit public policy organization that supports deficit reduction, pegged the uncovered cost at $3.3 trillion over the next nine years.

All three organizations, which used different timelines, models and assumptions, found the bill would deliver meager gains in economic growth, which in turn would generate little in added revenues.

“It’s not just the congressional scorekeepers that find this bill would increase the deficit,” said Erica York, the vice president for federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation. “It’s everyone outside of Congress, too.”

Ms. York’s think tank, which generally favors lower taxes, found the Republican bill would increase the debt by more than $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

“And when all the models are in unison — yes, this will increase the deficit; no, it will not do much for growth — it really doesn’t make sense to triple down on the strategy to blame the scorekeeper,” Ms. York added. “The legislation is the problem.”

Citing an extension of tax cuts as a potential driver of U.S. debt, which now exceeds $36 trillion, the ratings firm Moody’s last month downgraded the nation’s credit. Yet Republicans have overwhelmingly rejected the negative assessments, even suggesting at times that the tax cuts technically cost nothing, since some of them were already in place.

“If you care about deficits and debt, this bill dramatically improves the fiscal picture,” said Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, wrote on social media.

Republicans have opted to “shoot the messenger,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist who led the Congressional Budget Office from 2003 to 2005.

Appearing on Fox News last week, Speaker Mike Johnson said the tax bill would deliver the “largest amount of savings in the history of government on planet Earth.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at one point likened the budget office and its methodology to the scandal-ridden, failed company Enron. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said last month that it was a “fake budget office.”

And Representative Jodey C. Arrington, a Texas Republican who leads the House Budget Committee, said at a recent hearing that the bill amounted to a major “step to begin bending the curve” on federal debt.

Top White House aides this week also pointed to the president’s tariffs, arguing that the steep duties he has threatened to apply to nearly every U.S. trading partner would generate significant revenue. In a separate report on Wednesday, the budget office found that tariffs could reduce deficits by about $3 trillion over 10 years.

But many of the tariffs are in legal limbo after a court ruling last month, all the while the Trump administration is racing to strike a series of trade deals with other countries. If the United States lowers its tariff rates, either because of a judge’s order or through negotiations, then the government would collect less revenue.

The Congressional Budget Office prohibits employees from engaging in political activities that could be seen as undermining its neutrality. Despite this, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, criticized it on Tuesday, suggesting that the office had a partisan bias because there “hasn’t been a single staffer” who has “contributed to a Republican since the year 2000.”

While the office issues budgetary reports on legislation, it does not estimate changes to the tax code, which falls to the Joint Committee on Taxation. That office plays a key advisory role in the legislative drafting process, yet it largely has escaped Republicans’ ire.

Douglas W. Elmendorf, a Democratic economist who served as the director of the budget office from 2009 to 2015, said the nonpartisan experts were crucial for “bringing the best professional evidence to bear and laying out the consequences of policy choices to Congress as honestly as they can.”

But the nature of its work — “predicting the future,” in the words of Mr. Elmendorf — also subjects the office and its peers to a great deal of political risk.

In one high-profile example, the Joint Committee on Taxation discovered after Democrats adopted their signature legislation in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, that it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than anticipated.

The discrepancy owed in large part to greater demand for one of the bill’s components, a set of tax credits for electric vehicle purchases that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered on more generous terms than scorekeepers had anticipated. But Republicans seized on that mishap, seeing it as evidence of political bias in the budget office’s work.

“If we as lawmakers have to make decisions based on C.B.O. and Joint Tax’s analysis, you betcha it better be right,” Mr. Smith charged at a hearing in February. “And it hasn’t been.”

Republicans also contend that congressional analysts fail to account for the ways that their new tax measure can unlock economic growth — and, in the process, generate higher tax revenues.

By the White House’s estimation, the Republican tax proposal could raise output by as much as about 5 percent in the short term, compared with what might happen without the bill.

“Obviously, we think our forecast is right, and the other forecasts are wrong,” said Stephen Miran, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

But the White House analysis appeared to be premised in part on the bill extending a set of generous corporate tax deductions on a permanent basis, something that House Republicans did not actually propose. A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Using a different metric, congressional tax analysts found that Republicans’ specific changes to the tax code would increase the average growth rate in U.S. output by only 0.03 percent annually. That mirrored findings from many outside economists, including at Penn Wharton, which projected that the output would be just 0.4 percent higher by 2034.

Asked about the estimate, Mr. Miran said last month that Penn Wharton had a “track record of being wrong.” He argued that experts had failed to appreciate the full effect of Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, saying they generated more than $1 trillion in revenue beyond what had been forecast.

But Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, also questioned that figure. He said revenues rose in the year after the tax cuts were adopted for other reasons: a flood of emergency federal stimulus during the coronavirus pandemic, a surge in price inflation and a rise in immigration.

Still, Mr. Goldwein stressed there was an urgent need for unbiased policy advice in Washington.

“Without that,” he said, “you have chaos.”