The White House is lying about the GOP budget bill
Cutting taxes and raising spending does not shrink the deficit
Dear readers,
At a White House press briefing on Thursday, May 29, press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the House-passed GOP budget bill "would not increase the budget deficit," as projected by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
Instead, Leavitt said the bill would decrease the deficit by increasing tax revenues through economic growth, citing a report by the Council of Economic Advisers (an executive office staffed by Donald Trump's appointees). Leavitt framed this section of her briefing as "debunking false claims circulating in the press" about the budget bill. On Fox News, just after the briefing, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson repeated Leavitt’s claim and said the CBO was “run by Democrats” who “do not have our best interests” in mind.
The claim that the bill “will not increase the deficit” is best described as a lie. That is the best word to use when someone is saying something they cannot be sure about, and which contradicts existing independent accounts. Technically, Leavitt can plead ignorance, but it would be like if I told my dog that if I let her out in the rain, she wouldn’t get wet — and then when she did, I said I didn’t know it was raining because I didn’t look out the window. (Or I guess more accurately, I was looking at a painting of a sunny landscape. I don’t know, this is a tortured metaphor.)
This is altogether pretty unsurprising for a White House press office that has been willing to peddle misinformation to the public about many other aspects of the Trump administration's policy agenda.
But worse than being factually inaccurate (plausibly knowingly so), Leavitt's comments are also just the latest in a string of lies and exaggerations that attempt to cover for the consequences of the administration’s actions. Her tenure as press secretary underscores how post-truth politics is warping public perceptions. As a result of sucking viewers into a siloed information ecosystem that the White House steers and shapes, an entire section of the population is increasingly unmoored from objective reality.
This is not about partisanship, but facts, objectivity, and shared understanding.
Although I had planned to write about something else, this news intersects neatly with the mission of this publication. We are truth-seeking, data-driven, and concerned with both how public opinion shapes democracy and how it is shaped. And so it is worth a short Friday post to discuss the debate over the bill's financial impact, how partisanship enables lying from officials, and the impact that has on public opinion, elections, and democracy. That, and more, in this week's Chart of the Week.
Who's right, the CEA or everybody else?
Let’s quickly deal with the allegations against the Congressional Budget Office.
The CBO is a non-partisan office made up of non-partisan officials who analyze the impacts of legislation. Their scoring is historically very reliable, and there is little evidence of partisan bias in their work. The director, Philip Swagel, was a Bush appointee and was reappointed to the CBO role in July 2023 by the leaders of both chambers of Congress.
Even if you don’t trust the CBO, all you have to know is that the budget bill cuts taxes on the wealthy and corporations while increasing spending by hundreds of billions of dollars across other departments. It also increases the state and local tax deduction, which is good for rich people but does not affect small businesses. Combined with cuts to IRS enforcement… well, you don’t need an economics degree to do that math.
Notably, it's not just the CBO saying the bill will increase the budget deficit. Here are three more sources from both conservative and independent organizations that claim anywhere from a $2 trillion to $5 trillion increase in the total deficit over the next 10 years.
From what I can tell, the CEA report gets around this by only analyzing the simulated consequences of the tax cuts on small businesses, and not on the decline in revenue from rich households or the cuts to Medicaid and other services that will impact the poor.
Media incentives for normalizing lies
The result of Leavitt’s attacks is that we are currently living in a kind of "reverse cargo cult" for state media. The White House claims their bill will result in growth ("actually, according to our economists, decreasing revenues will shrink the budget!"). But when reality sets in and the bill looks cruel and inflationary for deficits, partisans can only conclude the budget math doesn't exist and only trickle-down growth does. That’s why the CEA report only talks about future growth from “unleashing America’s economic engine” via tax cuts.
The point of Leavitt’s statement isn't to persuade everyone, but to create enough noise and confusion that the party line becomes the only thing that matters. If you're on the team, you believe what you're supposed to believe. You have an ideologically aligned report you can send to your group chat, so you can choose your own reality.
Much of the press has not responded in the way you’d expect from an independent fourth estate. A reporter from CBS News was the only journalist in the conference to ask about the CEA versus CBO score of the bill. Leavitt simply repeated her claim, citing the CEA report as a credible alternative to the CBO scoring (it’s not), and the reporter moved on. That is not the full picture!
This pattern — make a claim, ignore or attack counter-evidence, deny at all costs, and repeat — has become the standard operating procedure in the Trump White House.
For their part, Fox News has only parroted the party line — but there’s not much you can do about that. The bigger problem is that much of the supposedly fact-based media has not acted proportionately to the threat, saying Leavitt “contradicted” the CBO or something similar. Allowing the administration to anchor the economic consequences of slashing revenues to a difference between estimates from different sources gives the White House the ground on the underlying issue. The math is actually not really up for debate.
Unfortunately, the big ad-supported media companies have no choice but to play along. They do so sometimes because they are lazy or strapped for human resources, but mostly it's a perverse subconscious consequence of the way financial incentives condition journalists in these organizations to avoid conflict. The big companies are terrified of being called biased, since that may decrease their already historically low credibility with the population. That would only shrink viewership further, impacting ad revenues and hurting the bottom line. The result of this cycle reinforcing itself over 50 years is that these companies have gone soft when profit is on the line.
There is also a problem of misaligned or lagging values. The predominant J-School curriculum was developed in a period when parties were not as severely asymmetric in their responsibility to facts and democracy as they are today. The classwork and connections instill a value of fairness and equal time to all parties in their students. In these social circles, truth and partisan balance are seen as competing values, not hierarchical ones. Journalists are told to report the news, but not to stand up for the facts.
Empirical effects of motivated reasoning and misinformation on budget attitudes and economic sentiment
The White House position on the budget bill is only the latest example of a troubling trend. Zooming out, democracy cannot function properly without shared facts and rational discourse. The downstream consequences of the Republican party’s factless discourse show up in voter psychology and election outcomes. If you are a Republican, you are obligated to think the bill will reduce the budget and grow the economy. For the MAGA base, the facts are almost entirely beside the point.
You can observe these downstream impacts of partisan motivated reasoning and the White House’s lies in survey data, including the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment data and our Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll.
In the UMich time series data, there's a clear pattern of GOP evaluations of the economy responding arbitrarily to the party in power. Sentiment plummets when a Democrat is elected to the White House, before they enact any policy, and surges when a Republican takes office, staying elevated regardless of policy outputs and economic outcomes.
These effects are present for Democrats but comparatively smaller. This shows a long-term tendency toward motivated reasoning for partisans, incentivizing the manufacturing and uptake of “alternative facts” about the economy.
We have some evidence these opinions are tied to news diet, though it would be good for another pollster who was in the field on Thursday to take a closer look. I ran a model on our SIN/Verasight data to predict responses to questions about economics given respondents’ demographics, partisanship, and their stated news diet — specifically, whether they mentioned trade, tariffs, local business conditions, or the stock market in an open-ended question about what economic news they had heard recently.
The most important variable in predicting economic attitudes? Party identification, by a mile. It’s twice as predictive of attitudes on personal family finances as race and 1.3x predictive of self-reported income, and up to 5x as predictive as other demographic or attitudinal variables. The results are even more extreme if you ask voters how they feel about the national economy instead of their finances, where the predictive power of party ID is 4x as large as self-reported income and 3x as large as news exposure.
Party identification is also the leading predictor of responses to our question on the budget bill, though income is also significant there.
To be clear, these models do not suggest that attitudes are caused by these factors, just that they are strongly related. But that is the point. The way you frame the question barely matters. The numbers barely matter. What matters is which team you're on.
Democracy requires us to live in a shared reality
The implications of this partisan reality gap are profound. This isn't just about different interpretations of the same data — it's about living in fundamentally different realities, uncritically accepting different information from opinion leaders and signals from partisan actors. When one side of the aisle is sending signals largely regardless of the facts, you have to wonder about the information quality of their opinions and the downstream impacts on democracy.
To put a finer point on it: If even 5% of the electorate cast ballots for Donald Trump because they were told in 2024 that he would decrease prices, which his stated policy agenda obviously would not do, that is a strong argument that our information environment "biases" election outcomes away from the truth (in the sense that it moves them from the prior you'd expect without biased information diets).
The consequences extend far beyond economic sentiment. When we can't agree on basic facts — whether about the economy, climate change, or public health — it becomes impossible to have meaningful policy debates. Instead, we get monologues from the press secretary defending the estimates of an ideologically aligned group of economists working to sell us an airport of wooden planes.
This is the post-truth world: not a world without facts, but a world where facts are just another team jersey. The result is a kind of epistemic arms race. Each side builds its own reality — currently with the right in America having an extreme advantage and head start, and a bend toward factlessness — and the rest of us are left trying to make sense of the noise. The truth is out there, but it's getting harder and harder to hear.
If our shared sense of reality keeps fragmenting along partisan lines, what does that mean for the future of democracy? To some extent, democratic legitimacy depends on at least some agreement among the people about what's real: The real threats facing voters, the real data about those threats, etc. The answer isn't encouraging. A democracy can't function when its citizens can't agree on what's true. We're not just disagreeing about solutions anymore — we're disagreeing about the landscape of problems themselves.
The corporate media's role in this crisis is particularly troubling. Rather than serving as a check on power and a source of shared facts, many outlets have become amplifiers of partisan framing, and others proselytizers of the lies themselves. The result is a feedback loop: politicians make claims, media outlets repeat them without sufficient scrutiny, and voters internalize these claims as reality. Breaking this cycle will require both media reform and a renewed commitment to truth-seeking in our political discourse.
That's one reason why I'm happy I get to write this newsletter for you all. An independent press, where we root our narratives in facts regardless of the impacts on viewership, is the future of accountability journalism.
Subscriber specials and newsletter items:
Missed posts and programming notes:
On Tuesday, I published a subscribers-only post about the concept of latent opinion — that future opinion is what determines election outcomes, and that's different from what public opinion is today. (I also just gave a lecture about this at the University of Minnesota, in case anyone is interested in the slides.)
Reminder to submit questions for the June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll! I will be randomly selecting at least one question written by a subscriber, but they have to be in by June 3.
Got questions? The first Strength In Numbers community Q&A will come out in late June. I’m figuring out a system for submitting questions; let me know your preference in the comments below.
Have a wonderful weekend, readers. I’m leaving to work on the community garden now (it’s tomato-planting season!).
Elliott
Your last point about an independent press: for me it's not an overstatement to say that a free press is the fourth branch of government in a democracy. It is certainly a first-among-equals player in the Constitution's checks-and-balances scheme.
Keep up the good work. "In God We Trust...all others, bring data".
"Democracy requires us to live in a shared reality" - yep, herein lies the problem.