The Congressional Budget Office will release a full cost estimate this week for the “One Big Beautifull Bill Act” passed by the House last month — but some top Republicans have already made clear they’re willing to dismiss the official analysis and come up with their own projections.
A preliminary analysis by the CBO said that the bill would add $2.3 trillion to deficits through the year 2034, including some $3.8 trillion in reduced revenue from tax changes. Yet in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that the Republican bill will not add to the deficit but will ultimately reduce it.
“It's not going to add to the debt,” Johnson said.
NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Johnson if he was really telling the American people that the GOP bill will not add one penny to the debt or deficit despite projections from the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Tax Foundation, and the Penn Wharton Budget Model that all say the debt will grow by trillions of dollars. Johnson then ventured even further.
“I am telling you, this is going to reduce the deficit,” he insisted.
Johnson argued that the CBO has historically underestimated the economic boost from tax cuts — The Washington Post’s fact-checker called that a “bogus attack” — and he pointed out that the scorekeeper’s latest projections are based on “anemic” economic growth expectations of 1.8% a year. The Trump administration has suggested that stronger growth of 3% may be more likely and would help the bill pay for itself.
Johnson also claimed that other expert analyses rely on so-called static scoring rather than what’s known as dynamic scoring, which factors in economic feedback from the law’s changes. Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, pushed back on that claim. “The Speaker needs to update his talking points,” she wrote on X, adding that the Tax Foundation “was one of the pioneers of dynamic scoring, and our dynamic score of the bill shows it will add to the deficit, even when accounting for higher economic growth.”
Vought also rejected the idea that the Republican bill will add to the debt. “This bill doesn’t increase the deficit or hurt the debt,” Vought claimed on CNN. “In fact, it lowers it by $1.4 trillion.”