Don't Let CBO Scoring Fool You

There's been a whole lot of agita from the right-hand side about the "reconciliation bill" — the Big Beautiful Bill — that passed the House a few days ago. A lot of it is based on the CBO scoring the bill as costing $4 trillion dollars in revenue. And why does the CBO think that? Because the CBO thinks the government is entitled to all the lovely tax money that would come in when the tax cuts from Trump's first term expire. But the BBB went and extended the tax cuts. Those rats.

Stephen Miller explains the error:

I see some self-described libertarians siding with lefty bureaucrats at CBO who claim the Big Beautiful Bill will “explode the debt.” This is based entirely on CBO claiming that extending the current tax rates (not raising them) will “cost” the government $4 trillion in revenue.…

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 28, 2025

Of course, along with that, a lot of people are complaining that the BBB didn't codify the DOGE spending cuts. Which is all well and good, except that there are pretty strict limits on what a reconciliation bill can do. The details are as arcane as anything you'd see come out of the Senate rules. In particular, there's something called the Byrd Rule (named, of course, for Senator Robert C. Byrd, who never saw a spending cut he liked) that lays out rules about what can and can't be done in a reconciliation. 

So here's a reality check. 

1. You can only get cuts if you can get a bill passed through both the House and the Senate.
2. There aren't enough Republican votes in the Senate to prevent a bill being blocked by a filibuster.
3. There are only two methods through which cuts can be passed by a simple majority: reconciliation, and rescission.

In an X post, "The Reckoning" puts it bluntly:

I’m going to go slow for those that doesn’t understand.

The way you pass cuts is through bills that can clear the Senate with a simple majority.

Why? Because Democrats will never vote for cuts and therefore it’s impossible to get 60 votes in the Senate.

There are two such…

— The Reckoning 💥 (@sethjlevy) May 28, 2025

So as not to tempt you into a half-hour of doom-scrolling X, here's the whole discussion:

i’m going to go slow for those that doesn’t understand.

the way you pass cuts is through bills that can clear the senate with a simple majority.

why? because democrats will never vote for cuts and therefore it’s impossible to get 60 votes in the senate.

there are two such legislative pathways.

reconciliation and rescission.

in reconciliation you can only cut mandatory spending, like medicaid.

discretionary spending, which is what the doge cuts are, must be a rescission.

the rescission process must be initiated by the president sending a message to congress indicating that appropriated funds are not needed.

that rescission becomes law if passed by simple majorities in both chambers.

Stephen Miller again:

A lot of the fiscal discussion around the Big Beautiful Bill seems to conflate, whether willfully or not, the words “spending” versus the word “deficit.”

There is no dispute that the bill cuts over $1.6 trillion in spending. It mainly accomplishes this through the largest…

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 1, 2025

In other words, the BBB cuts spending by $1.6 trillion. This is good. But the CBO scoring says it increases the deficit by $4 trillion in our money that they think the government is entitled to. This is not good. It means more spending cuts  are needed. But they can't be pushed through in the reconciliation, and you have to have a reconciliation so it can pass without Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren's permission.

Now, remember, there are two ways to cut spending with a simple majority: through reconciliation, and through rescission. Well, son of a gun:

🚨 #BREAKING: The White House will be sending a DOGE rescissions package to Congress on MONDAY, per Trump Budget Director Russ Vought

The first cuts will be for foreign aid, USAID and NPR

KEEP UP THE PRESSURE! CODIFY THE DOGE CUTS! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/fI0rqcpFIB

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 28, 2025

There's a lesson here. Even a couple of lessons. The first is that you should always take anything — and in particular, anything anyone says with their hair obviously on fire — with a grain of salt. It's easy to get all excited about something. The second is that it's only been 132 days since Trump was inaugurated. Some things take time. So don't set fire to your hair without examining what's really happening.

Elon Musk and DOGE are bringing much-needed accountability to our out-of-control bureaucracy as they take a chainsaw to rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.

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