EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Andy Barr debunks CBO report Democrats are trying to use to derail the Big, Beautiful Bill

Congressional Democrats thought the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reconciliation bill report was the slam dunk they needed to derail President Donald Trump’s and Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R. La.) momentum behind their Big, Beautiful Bill.

However, Rep. Andy Barr (R., Ky.) has been delivering House Republicans exactly the rebuttal that their colleagues need — and the timing couldn’t be more critical.

“The CBO alarmists are back at the eleventh hour to scare House Republicans,” Barr told the Washington Reporter. “But let’s not forget — they were off by over a trillion dollars on the Trump tax cuts and wrong about Medicaid expansion and the IRA.”

“The D.C. establishment needs to realize that CBO’s crystal ball has been shattered for years,” Barr said. “It’s time for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s big, beautiful bill — the one we ran and won on.”

Following a CBO report that claimed that extending Trump’s tax cuts would add to the deficit, Barr has been one of the House GOP’s go-to members on pushing back on the false claims about the Republican agenda. He has frequently appeared on liberal news outlets to explain the merits behind the bill.

However, the CBO projection is downright wrong, Barr said. The Kentucky Republican said the report “wrongly claim[s] the bottom 10 percent will lose income and savings, but that projection is based entirely on a reduction in government benefits, not a drop in actual earnings.”

Barr’s pushback on the CBO scoring mirrors what Republicans are circulating internally. Talking points obtained by the Reporter urge Republican members of Congress to note that the latest CBO report is “a score based on what Democrats asked for, not what’s actually in the bill.”

Earlier this year, Barr introduced legislation, the CBO Scoring Accountability Act, which could prevent Democrats from abusing the agency to try and derail the Republicans’ agenda.

“This bill shines a light on the long-term fiscal impact of major laws and gives Congress the tools to improve future policymaking based on actual data, not just rosy forecasts,” Barr said at the time.

Beyond its faulty projection, Barr said that the “CBO is misjudging the impact of reforms to the Inflation Reduction Act, including the trimming of green energy tax credits, despite having already overstated their cost savings by hundreds of billions.”

“CBO also fails to accurately model the effects of updated work requirements in SNAP and the scaling back of fraud, waste, and abuse in expansion-driven Medicaid spending, two areas where CBO has previously missed the mark by massive margins,” Barr said.

“In all of these cases,” Barr explained, “the scoring ignores labor supply responses, growth effects, and long-term fiscal gains, just as it has done before.”

“Once again, we are getting flawed projections that misrepresent the bill’s actual impact,” he added.

Barr also noted a fundamental miscalculation the CBO is making. It “assumes only 1.8 percent annual economic growth over the next decade, but if growth reaches 4 percent, consistent with the outcomes of past pro-growth tax and deregulation policies, that could generate over $6.5 trillion in additional economic output, drastically shrinking the national debt as a percentage of GDP.”

“That kind of expansion, driven by unleashing U.S. energy, delivering family-focused tax relief, bonus depreciation, 100 percent expensing for new and existing manufacturing facilities, and enhanced and extended R&D expensing would massively increase government revenues without raising rates,” Barr explained. “This is jet fuel for an economy that has been hamstrung by Biden regulations for 4 years. CBO’s inability to correctly incorporate that in their modelling that doesn’t just understate the bill’s benefits, it fundamentally misleads the public and lawmakers alike.”

These mistakes by the CBO haven’t come out of nowhere. Barr also told the Reporter that the CBO “has a long track record of serious miscalculations that have distorted policymaking and undermined any efforts for reform.”

The CBO’s trillion-dollar miscalculation that underestimated revenue from the first Trump tax cuts “should have permanently discredited their static modeling approach,” Barr said.

But that’s not the only CBO failure. The organization “overstated the deficit reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act by $358 billion, projecting savings that actually resulted in $300 billion in deficits.”

Barr noted that when it comes to Medicaid expansion predictions, the CBO “missed enrollment projections by nearly 50 percent, costing the federal government nearly a trillion dollars since 2014, and their cost estimate for the 2009 SNAP stimulus was off by over 100 percent, costing tens of billions more than expected.”

“These aren’t rounding errors,” Barr noted. “They are fundamental modeling flaws that have led to trillions in fiscal consequences.”

Rep. Lisa McClain (R., Mich.), the Chairwoman of the House GOP Conference, told the Reporter that she’s "not surprised” to see Democrats attempting to leverage the CBO report.

“They’re trying to cover up their record of voting for tax hikes, illegal immigrants, and unsafe communities,” McClain said. “This is just another dishonest distraction.”