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As the House Rules Committee’s early-hours hearing on President Donald Trump’s ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill,” got underway, Rep. Erin Houchin, a Republican from Indiana, asked Jodey Arrnington, the chairman of the Budget Committee, a simple question about the Congressional Budget Office.
“Has the CBO ever been wrong?” she asked.
Arrington responded by noting that the CBO, which scores and estimates how much legislation will cost, got wrong the price of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the 2017 tax slash law whichTrump signed, and the scoring of the 2010 health care law signed by Barack Obama, also known as Obamacare.
“In my short tenure, they actually were off their estimation of the deficit,” he said regarding spending under President Joe Biden. “They were wrong in their projections on revenue to the Treasury post-TCJA.”
Republicans began their hearing on Rules – which needs to pass legislation for it to go to the floor for a simple majority vote – at 1 a.m. Wednesday.
“So all this conversation about how reliant we should be on the CBO score to tell us what the cost of we’re doing is going to be, CBO has not been reliable, as history has shown,” he emphasized.
Arrington and Houchin's characterizations are selective at best, but a way to advance partisanship at worst.
Despite occasionally falling short, the Congressional Budget Office is still regarded as the most credible and nonpartisan source for spending projections on Capitol Hill. Its director, Phillip Swagel, an alumnus of the George W. Bush administration, began the job during Republican control of the Senate in 2019, and was re-appointed during Democratic control of the Senate in 2023.
Yet House Republicans have every reason to discredit the CBO ahead of a vote on Trump’s proposal. They don’t like the numbers.
The CBO found that if Congress passed just an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, the deficit would increase by $3.8 trillion. That same analysis showed that the bottom ten percent of households would lose 4 percent of income in 2033, while the top 10 percent of households would see their incomes increase by 2 percent in 2033.
This would be the result mostly of proposed changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, and Medicaid. The bill would put in place work requirements that fiscal conservatives like Texas Rep. Chip Roy and South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman considered insufficient.
Specifically, it also requires that parents of children between the ages of seven and 18 to work for SNAP benefits – but a parent can get an exception if they are a stay-at-home married parent.
And that’s not the only body blow that is ready for Democrats to attack. A separate CBO report on the estimated effects on the budget found that as many as 7.6 million people would lose coverage because of the Medicaid changes. That might make some of the lawmakers from swing districts, or with large swaths of their population dependent on Medicaid, queasy.
And this all came without the manager’s amendment, which would lay out the side deal that House Speaker Mike Johnson made with the SALT caucus, a group of Republicans from blue states who want the cap raised on the amount of money that people can deduct from their state and local taxes on their federal taxes.
As of Wednesday evening, the House leadership had yet to release the manager’s amendment. As a result, House Republicans are pushing for a bill that is already outdated.
Trump had made his trek to the Hill on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, he invited the fiscal hawks in the House Freedom Caucus to the White House. Two of them, Ralph Norman and Chip Roy of Texas, who both sit on the Budget Committee, initially sank the bill on Friday before they voted “present” late on Sunday evening to allow it to move to Rules, where both men also sit.
But it seems like the pressure campaign hasn’t worked on the Freedom Caucus. Before the meeting, Roy posted on X, that he would dig in his heels.
“Writing a deficit-backed blank check (SALT) is easier than cutting spending (DOGE, Green New Scam, Post-COVID spending),” he posted. “Congress/swamp will always choose the easy route but we can’t afford it.”
In the past, Roy has correctly pointed out that the bill would explode the federal budget deficit.
Yet the House Republican leadership has decided to throw congressional math homework on the debt out the window for political expediency. Whether the Freedom Caucus decides to give them a failing grade will determine if Trump’s bill passes.
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