President Donald Trump highlighted on Thursday that even by Congressional Budget Office calculations, the cost of the “Big Beautiful Bill” is offset by the revenue being generated by tariffs over the next 10 years.
During a news conference from the Oval Office with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump responded to the criticism leveled by Elon Musk and others that the bill will add trillions of additional dollars to the national debt.
The CBO estimated that the Big Beautiful Bill will result in $2.4 trillion more in deficit spending, plus an additional $551 billion in interest paid on the national debt over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
However, Trump pointed out that the CBO, which he said is “run by Democrats,” also calculated that his tariffs will reduce deficit spending by $2.8 trillion over the next decade.
The president asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to elaborate on the issue.
“We keep hearing from the CBO that there’s going to be a large deficit from the bill, which we disagree with, but using the CBO scoring, they came out and scored the tariff revenue, we think it will be a minimum of $2.8 trillion over the 10-year window, which actually puts the bill in surplus, if you include the tariff revenue, which they won’t do,” Bessent said.
.@SecScottBessent: “[The CBO] came out and scored the tariff revenue, we think it will be the minimum of $2.8T over the 10-year window, which actually puts the bill in surplus if you include the tariff revenue — which they won’t do.” pic.twitter.com/SxOSsk5kLf
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 5, 2025
Trump then reiterated, “It gives you a tremendous surplus, but we’re not allowed to use that, for some reason. They say scoring.”
Both White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought defended the Big Beautiful Bill Wednesday, arguing the CBO is scoring it wrong.
“OMB just reviewed the new CBO score of the One Big Beautiful bill. It confirms what we knew about the bill at House passage. The bill REDUCES deficits by $1.4 trillion over ten years when you adjust for CBO’s one big gimmick — not using a realistic current policy baseline,” Vought posted on X.
“It includes $1.7 trillion in mandatory savings, the most in history. If you care about deficits and debt, this bill dramatically improves the fiscal picture,” he added.
Miller responded to the post: “Exactly. The only spending change in the bill is a giant spending cut. The entire ‘deficit’ change per the lefty CBO was not expiring the Trump Tax Cut from 2017.”
Exactly. The only spending change in the bill is a giant spending cut. The entire “deficit” change per the lefty CBO was not expiring the Trump Tax Cut from 2017. Further, because it’s a (party-line) reconciliation bill, no monies are appropriated in the bill to fund government. https://t.co/FJsTf3SZk2
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 4, 2025
In other words, the CBO’s score of the bill calls for allowing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to expire and assumes that the government will take in more money at the restored higher rates.
Supporters of the Big Beautiful Bill argue that the CBO miscalculated the impact of the TCJA because it did not adequately factor in the impact of economic growth, spurred by tax cuts, on total revenue.
In 2017, before the bill’s passage, total revenue was $3.3 trillion. Last year, with the tax cuts largely in place, revenue was $4.9 trillion. This is not surprising because the Gross Domestic Product grew from $19.6 trillion in 2017 to $29.1 trillion in 2024.
The CBO has a track record of fuzzy math. For example, the Trump Tax Cuts outperformed CBO’s flawed analysis by $1.5 trillion. Conversely, the CBO painted a rosy picture of the Democrat IRA when in reality it cost taxpayers hundreds of billions more than CBO projected! pic.twitter.com/a5Sx2vKX1v
— Rep. Bill Huizenga (@RepHuizenga) June 4, 2025
More economic productivity meant more tax revenue. This was the case following the John F. Kennedy tax cuts in the 1960s and the Ronald Reagan cuts in the 1980s, as well.
The House Ways and Means Committee noted that in the five years after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passage, “tax revenues averaged $170 billion per year above CBO’s post-2017 projections.”
Further, by fiscal year 2022, that figure was $884 billion higher.
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