The White House's fuzzy math is starting to haunt the Big, Beautiful Bill

CNN

2 days ago

Elon Musk's 36-word social media missile directed at the cornerstone of President Donald Trump's legislative agenda marked the latest, if most visceral, example of a growing problem for the White House.
Nobody buys its math.
'I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore,' Musk posted in the middle of the White House press briefing in a dramatic escalation of his initial objections to the giant domestic policy bill's cost. 'This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.'
Musk's post (and its Wednesday follow up) landed at the most delicate moment for an essential pillar of Trump's entire domestic agenda. Senate Republicans are set to launch their high-stakes effort to pass the bill, while Trump and his top advisers seek to aggressively counter the widespread consensus among economists, nonpartisan budget scorekeepers and Wall Street analysts that the bill will pile trillions of dollars onto the soaring US debt.
Trump's top economic officials insist, unequivocally and repeatedly, that the 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' won't add to the debt over 10 years. The definitive statements serve as an unabashed outlier among the catalogue of budget scores, growth forecasts and macroeconomic analyses produced since House Republicans passed their version of Trump's agenda by the narrowest of margins.
Differences of opinion between economists, scorekeepers and analysts are commonplace, as are the heated rhetorical attacks lobbed at the Congressional Budget Office. They aren't exclusive to this White House. But the near-universal agreement that the bill's combination of tax and spending cuts net out as a significant deficit driver lays bare an unusually dramatic disconnect with the view of Trump's economic team.
White House officials defend their outlier projections with their view that the bill will spark a durable surge in economic activity that, paired with their broader economic agenda, will far outpace the median economic forecasts.
That, in turn, would drive up federal tax receipts and fill most, if not all, of the hole created by $3.7 trillion loss of revenue to the government projected over 10 years at the same time Trump's tariffs would drive a dramatic surge in revenue not included in any budget score tied to the bill.
The $1.3 trillion in mandatory spending cuts over a decade would mark the starting point White House officials will take into the looming spending battle on Capitol Hill, where Trump and Republican leaders will drive a hardline view that any bipartisan agreement must include deep discretionary spending cuts.
To put it plainly, the White House rationale is tied to a combination of projections and assumptions that crash head-on with economic, political and geopolitical consensus views of reality.
'There are a lot of arguments Republicans can make here – and the White House makes them, too – about the merits of this package and our long-standing belief that scorekeepers consistently fail to capture the effect of tax cuts,' said a Republican economic official who has served in multiple GOP administrations. 'But I'm not sure why they insist on going this particular route given the design of the bill.'
But White House officials, who regularly point to several projections that undershot Trump's first term economy, have elevated that message at a critical moment.
The White House's messaging is intended to undercut public opposition from Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, as well as the private anxiety of a handful of others as the Senate mulls changes to the House-passed version of the plan, according to multiple Senate GOP aides.
'I want to see the tax cuts made permanent, but I also want to see the $5 trillion in new debt removed from the bill,' Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul said Tuesday. 'At least four of us in the Senate feel this way.'
But it's also directed at an audience that carries far more sway over Trump's economic agenda than any politician: bond investors, who have grown increasingly jittery in recent months.
Escalating concern over stratospheric US debt levels drove last month's credit rating downgrade from Moody's, which helped spark another round of tumult in the world's largest and most liquid bond market. Investors had already signaled unease with Trump's expansive 'Liberation Day' tariffs in April, but as the House moved toward a vote on the bill last month, bond investors once again got jittery.
That signaled bond investors' willingness to consider whether the decades-long warnings of a looming, but theoretical, US fiscal collapse may be inching closer to reality.
'You are going to see a crack in the bond market, OK?' said JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon during a May 30 discussion at the Reagan National Economic Forum in California. Dimon, who also said he supports the Republican bill because of the certainty it will bring to US tax policy, said he couldn't predict when exactly that kind of dramatic disruption would occur.
But Dimon said the current US fiscal position, absent a major and sustained policy shift, makes a crisis inevitable. 'It's going to happen,' Dimon said.
White House officials dismiss that worst-case scenario. They insist the administration isn't rattled by the spike in long-term US borrowing costs or the tumultuous few months in the US Treasury market. They say the bond market's fluctuations aren't aren't tethered to the realities underpinning the world's largest economy.
'I've known Jamie a long time, and for his entire career he's made predictions like this,' Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation. 'Fortunately, none of them have come true.'
Bessent's blunt dismissal of Dimon's prediction reflected a prevailing view inside the West Wing that boils down to, essentially (and sometimes, depending on the adviser, explicitly): 'Everyone else is wrong.'
After all, the bill represents an essential component of Trump's economic agenda. The package is more or less what every Republican elected in 2024 campaigned on with Trump.
This package includes the tax cuts at the heart of his economic agenda and a series of regulatory reforms that accelerate his sweeping deregulatory agenda. The bill also includes significant military and immigration enforcement spending that would fulfill campaign pledges.
Narrow majorities in both chambers were always going to make the effort a high-wire act to balance the hardline fiscal hawks' desires with the needs of the more moderate members who populate the conferences in both chambers.
But failure – and the devastating economic and political consequences it would bring – isn't really an option here for the White House or GOP leaders.
Still, the deficit concerns are very real and pose the most acute risk at this stage of Senate consideration. They also represent a far higher-stakes threat if bond investor jitters turn into something more dire.
White House officials are keenly aware they need to aggressively make their case to uneasy bond investors – and make it well.
That reality, more than anything else, raises the question of why officials insist on declaring the bill won't drive up deficits by even a dollar over 10 years. The big assumptions that underpin that projection go something like this:
1) Tariffs will produce trillions of dollars in revenue without hurting US economic growth.
2) Courts allow the White House's sweeping deregulatory agenda, including DOGE cuts, to go forward.
3) Business investment surges, even after the front-loaded corporate tax incentives expire in a couple years.
4) Backloaded spending cuts remain in place over a four-year period and Republicans secure major discretionary spending cuts that will require Democratic support.
You can see the sheer number of variables, many outside of Trump's control, in herent in those assertions.
That underscores the connective tissue between Trump's first and second terms – and the number of Trump advisers who were by his side then and now. Trump's advisers remain animated by the unyielding belief that the economic experts were proven wrong in Trump's first term.
They are betting that's the case again, with Trump's entire economic agenda hanging in the balance.
Musk's social media unburdening this week certainly wasn't helpful to the cause. But there is no discussion about any major course change at the White House.
'Nothing has changed from our view of the world,' Vought told reporters outside the West Wing a couple of hours of Musk's Tuesday post.