White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appears to have "completely made up" a claim in her attack against the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for forecasting President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add significantly to the federal deficit, immigration attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted on X Tuesday.
The CBO's preliminary report projects that OBBBA will add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, while leaving spending noticeably lower than today — something CNN's Kaitlan Collins brought up to Leavitt at a press briefing this week.
"You said recently that it is, quote 'blatantly wrong' to say that it adds to the deficit," said Collins, noting that she had disparaged the CBO's projections. "But Republicans like Ron Johnson and Rand Paul disagree, they say the bill will add to the deficit. That is their concern. Is it the White House's position that those two Republican senators are, quote, 'blatantly wrong?'"
"It is," said Leavitt. She claimed that the CBO is routinely off on projections, including on Trump's 2017 tax cut bill — even though in reality, deficits after that bill's passage were actually worse than CBO projected. But she also claimed, "there hasn't been a single staffer in the entire CBO that has contributed to a Republican since 2000," implying the agency's work was colored by bias.
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This is trivially easy to debunk, wrote Reichlin-Melnick.
"This is just completely made up? Anyone can go to OpenSecrets and see in a matter of moments that the literal Director of the CBO, a former Bush appointee appointed in a bipartisan fashion, donated to a Republican candidate in 2014," he wrote, posting a screenshot of the campaign disclosure.
While the White House continues to insist OBBBA will not increase the deficit, others are concerned, including not just some Republican senators but close Trump ally and tech billionaire Elon Musk, who proclaimed today that the bill is a "disgusting abomination."
Watch the original exchange below or at the link here.