Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought defended the Trump administration’s sweeping economic package on Sunday, pushing back on concerns it could balloon the national debt.
Vought called it a “paramount fiscally responsible bill” and said the White House remains confident it will pass the Senate and reach President Trump’s desk sometime in July, despite pushback from some Republican lawmakers and headlines over a major breakup between Elon Musk and the administration.
“We’re not worried about it. The president’s moving on,” Vought told “Fox News Sunday’s” Shannon Bream of the spat this week.
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“All of these headlines are missing the fact that the president is the leader of this administration and the one that is driving the agenda, and the people are going to come and go in an administration and the president will be there defending the interests of the American people,” he added.
Vought said the administration made “great progress” last week, namely with its ability to get the word out about the bill’s potential achievements for fiscal responsibility.
He said the administration has had a series of “great conversations” with senators about parts of the bill they would like to see improved or tweaked.
“There was a lot of reporting with regard to this week’s events [with Elon], but we moved forward, and we made progress with the bill, and I think we’re going to get the bill to the president’s desk in July,” he said.
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Some congressional lawmakers like Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., have voiced their opposition to the bill, which some argue will only contribute to the national debt pile of $36.2 trillion.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office speculated that the bill could add approximately $2.4 trillion to that number over the next decade with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget stating that the cost could rise to $3 trillion when taking interest into account or to $5 trillion if temporary tax cuts are made permanent, according to Reuters.
Vought pushed back against these claims, arguing that the “big beautiful bill” is instead “fiscally responsible.”
“All of the watchdogs use an artificial baseline that is part of the way that Washington, D.C. does business here, in which they assume that all spending is eternal… but tax relief in 2017 was to sunset and, as a result, when you just extend tax relief, you’re in a situation where it looks like this major cost, and of course that’s not a cost,” he said.
“If it were not to occur, it would be a major tax increase to the American people. So, when you adjust for that baseline… and this is putting aside the economic growth that we think that they also understate… it is $1.4 trillion in reduced deficits and debt. That’s why this is such a paramount fiscally responsible bill, not withstanding the watchdogs here in town.”
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