Even for an agency accustomed to criticism, this summer’s debate over Republicans’ big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts was a harsh one for the Congressional Budget Office. “Notorious for getting it wrong,” was the judgment of Speaker Mike Johnson. “Making the same mistakes,” was the refrain from House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. And President Donald Trump dismissed the CBO as “very hostile.” For CBO Director Phillip Swagel, the “incoming fire,” as he calls it, is simply part of the job. “We’re just trying to get it right and inform the Congress and the country,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “There’s no agenda here.” Tasked with producing nonpartisan analysis for Congress, it’s up to Swagel and expert staffers at the CBO to assess the impact of legislation on economic growth and the nation’s finances — producing “scores,” in the parlance of Washington, that often reverberate across the dominant political debates of the day. Both major political parties often dispute the agency’s findings, particularly when their top priorities are at stake. “Sometimes it’s noise, sometimes it’s not. But we just tune it out. Here we do our work,” Swagel said. “The thing that I do care about a lot is to make sure our work is accurate.” It’s a low-key approach Swagel has maintained at the CBO since 2019, when congressional leaders appointed him the director after stints in both Republican and Democratic administrations. An economist by trade, Swagel brings an inquisitive and genial approach to the job, his knowledge of government forged by work at the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund. “The challenge of doing analysis now,” Swagel said, “is the changes we’re seeing in our economy are really large.” From the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans, to the unprecedented implementation of sweeping tariffs on countries around the world, to massive tax and spending cuts passed into law this summer, assessing the trajectory of the U.S. economy has grown more difficult. Swagel recently sat down with the AP to talk at length about analyses from his agency, the future of the nation’s entitlement programs and the pressure to remain unbiased when data itself is at risk of being politicized. How Trump’s tariffs are upending economic models Trump’s sweeping tariffs plan has posed challenges to the CBO’s standard models for assessing trade. The baseline tariffs on all countries and higher rates on Trump’s “worst offenders” list are different from what “we’ve seen in more than 100 years,” Swagel said. It’s a dramatic shift away from the low-tariff era that has existed since World War II. “We’re going to be looking carefully to see if those models still apply, or if tariffs that are this large, do those have effects that we just haven’t counted on?” he said. So far, the CBO estimates the tariffs could reduce the national deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade, helping to offset the deficit increases it projects will result from the Republicans’ big bill passed this year. “It’s a huge impact,” Swagel said. The CBO also anticipates Trump’s tariffs will cause roughly two years of elevated inflation, Swagel said, causing price increases for businesses and customers. But he says those effects will be temporary. “As the tariffs go up and the prices go up with the […]  | Read More The Yeshiva World