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Both Republicans and Democrats have used analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office as a political cudgel when it suits them, but with unfavorable reviews of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” coming out, some in the GOP are questioning the relevancy of the agency.
The CBO’s latest analysis of the gargantuan tax cut and spending package found that the House Republican-authored super bill would add $2.4 trillion to the national deficit over the next decade and boot millions off of health insurance.
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Senate Republicans will now get their chance to tweak and change the legislation, and have vowed to do so, despite warnings from Trump to reshape the bill as little as possible.
Congressional Republicans have largely scoffed at the agency’s findings, arguing that the CBO doesn’t include expected economic growth or other factors into its scoring of the bill.
“I don’t care what the CBO says,” Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told Fox News Digital. “They’re irrelevant to me. They were biased before. They’ve been biased in other things, but all the numbers speak for themselves.”
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The agency’s latest score found that the House’s reconciliation offering would cut $1.2 trillion over a decade, add $2.4 trillion to the deficit and decrease revenues by $3.6 trillion. It also found that if the GOP’s proposals to slash Medicaid stay as is, nearly 11 million people would be booted from their health care.
That number cranks up to about 16 million Americans removed from the benefit rolls when factoring in Affordable Care Act provisions that are set to expire.
However, the White House declared the CBO scores inaccurate, and argued that the package achieved, through a combination of spending cuts, reversing regulations ushered in by the Biden administration and tariffs – which are not part of the bill – roughly $6.6 trillion in savings over the next decade.
Many raised issues with the agency’s accuracy, arguing that they got the score wrong for Trump’s 2017 tax package.
“I mean, I heard the numbers are always wrong,” said Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas. “What’s the purpose?”
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Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, agreed, and contended that it was “time to discuss the CBO being more damn accurate.”
Still, some Republicans believe the CBO serves a purpose.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she didn’t believe the agency should be done away with, adding “we need to have a source for scores.”
“We kind of go back and forth in terms of condemning CBO because we hate their score, or praising CBO because we like the outcome,” she said. “And I think that’s what we’re seeing a lot of right now, is looking at that CBO score and saying, ‘That’s not real.’”
Other lawmakers questioned what the alternative would be. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital, “We need something,” but acknowledged that he felt the agency was biased, and that both parties used scores “to our manipulation.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., believes that the agency’s score was wildly incorrect. Still, he is one of the main antagonists of the current bill because it does not go far enough to achieve deep spending cuts.
The lawmaker told Fox News Digital that he believed the 50-year-old agency would soon be a relic of the past.
“I think just AI is gonna replace them,” he said. “I’m using AI all the time to do the sensitivity analysis. I don’t need CBO to do these sensitivity analyses anymore, I can do it myself.”
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