Naomi Lim of the Washington Examiner reports the Biden administration’s response to recent bad news from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The White House’s political attacks on the Congressional Budget Office are raising eyebrows after Republicans asked the CBO to rescore President Joe Biden’s social welfare and climate spending bill as if its sprawling provisions would be extended indefinitely.
Now, one month after undermining the CBO over its alleged tax enforcement revenue projection inexperience, the White House is ripping last week’s report finding the legislation would add $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade as “fake.”
The latest CBO score of Biden’s social welfare and climate measure “cuts through the smoke-and-mirrors accounting the Democrats were using to ram through their costly reconciliation bill,” according to the Cato Institute’s tax policy director, Chris Edwards.
“CBO should be open to critique, as economists often make mistakes,” Edwards said. “But in this case, CBO projections provide a more realistic accounting than the low-balled costs suggested by the Democrats.”
“The Democrats are trying to impose permanent costs on to taxpayers with their new spending programs, so Congress should consider the long-term costs,” he added.
Conventional CBO reports analyze the law “as it is written,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center’s senior vice president, Bill Hoagland. But the request from Republicans Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri was “reasonable” because it is “hard to turn off programs once they begin,” Hoagland told the Washington Examiner.
“That’s not fake. That’s just asking a hypothetical,” the Republican Senate budget and appropriations expert said. “I do disagree with adding interest on the public debt.”
Psaki’s “fake” CBO score message is “laughable” after the White House falsely claimed the social welfare and climate bill would cost $0, according to Heritage Action for America spokesman Noah Weinrich.
