Top Trump economic adviser: ‘Never believe the CBO’

President Trump’s new chief economic adviser said Tuesday that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) should never be trusted, after the office projected that the Republican tax law would raise the nation’s annual deficit by more than $1 trillion.

“Never believe the CBO. Very important: Never believe them,” Larry Kudlow, the new head of the White House National Economic Council, said during an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday. “They’re always wrong, especially with regard to tax cuts, which they never score properly.”

The nonpartisan CBO reported that the GOP tax law passed last year would cut government revenue by $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years. They said that estimate drops to $1.3 trillion when factoring the potential economic growth the law is expected to create.

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Republicans have regularly pushed back on CBO estimates, saying they fail to appropriately consider the economic growth the GOP claims will be spurred by the tax cuts.

Kudlow, a former CNBC commentator and opinion contributor for The Hill, said that his comments were not critiques of the CBO’s motives but instead of their methodology.

“The CBO people are professionals. This is not a personal attack,” he said. “But their record on tax cuts is not good.”

But the CBO estimate is just one of a number of nonpartisan studies countering Republicans’ assertion that the tax law will pay for itself.