House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) swatted aside growing concerns that President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" on tax cuts will explode the federal deficit in an interview on Fox News Thursday.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan agency that scores budget bills, has come to the conclusion that the bill would add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over the decade — with the bill only achieving $1 trillion in savings from deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, energy investments, and other key programs.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, a steadfast Trump ally, criticized the bill, saying, "I was like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing. I think a bill can be, can be, can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it can be both."
But Johnson, pressed by Fox News anchors about Musk's comments, simply dismissed these numbers as fake.
"I sent my good friend Elon a long text message last night explaining that it can be big and beautiful," said Johnson. "So, what I wanted to make sure he understands is, the projection he's referring to and others is from the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. They are historically, totally unreliable. It's run by Democrats. 84 percent of the number-crunchers over there are donors to big Democrats. They don't have their best interests in mind and they've always been off."
Johnson then complained that the main problem with the CBO is they don't use "dynamic scoring," a thoroughly-discredited model for budget calculations that assumes massive amounts of economic growth from tax cuts. And he alleged the CBO was off by $1 trillion in estimating the impact of Trump's 2017 tax cuts — neglecting to mention that deficits were actually worse than the CBO expected after passage of the bill, not better.
Finally, Johnson complained that the CBO is giving "no credence" to the added revenue achieved through Trump's tariffs — even though the tariffs are shrinking the economy.
"We believe we are going to get the economy going, and this is going to be deficit-reducing at the end of the day," Johnson said, providing no additional evidence to support this.
Watch the video below or at the link here.
