Congress's top budget scorekeeper released two reports Wednesday suggesting that costs coming from President Trump's "big, beautiful bill" could be at least partially offset by tariffs, even as budget hawks offered caution about relying on trade policy for a permanent revenue stream.
What the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found in one report was that recently passed legislation in the House of Representatives is set to increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the next decade if it is signed into law.
The second report examined Trump's tariffs and found they could reduce primary deficits by $2.8 trillion over that same time frame — but with a significant assumption that current duties stay constant and in place even after Trump is scheduled to leave office.
The dual reports offered a new wrinkle in a week focused on Trump's likely budget-busting bill, offering ammunition to both sides of a cost debate currently splitting Republicans, including President Trump and Elon Musk.
Trump weighed in on Truth Social Thursday morning to tout the tariffs report, saying "too bad this information couldn’t have been released earlier."
The commentary from Trump, and some guarded praise from his team, came after a week which the White House otherwise spent trying to discredit the congressional scorekeeper.
Meanwhile, questions abounded at the idea of using trade policy, which can change at the stroke of a presidential pen and the president himself has suggested is a negotiating tactic, to offset the costs of permanent tax cuts.
"I certainly would not count on $3 trillion of possibly illegal tariffs that may or may not remain for the next 6 months, let alone the next 6 years, to pay for tax cuts that are gonna be put into law and can't be undone without another action of law," Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget noted on Wednesday.
A mix of praise and condemnation for Congress's scorekeeper
The back-and-forth began Wednesday when the nonpartisan (but recently controversial) CBO offered a new estimate of the cost of Trump's "big beautiful bill" and then dropped a second report looking at the effects of tariffs.
The first analysis underlined a consensus view — backed by multiple outside analyses — that the bill making its way through Congress will be deeply expensive.
Tax cuts in the bill deeply cut into government revenues and will increase overall deficits by $2.4 trillion over the next decade, the group found.
On Thursday, the CBO offered a third report looking at the debt-service costs from the bill: in other words how much the added borrowing will cost when it comes to future interest payments.
It found a price tag there of $551 billion over the coming decade pushing the overall price tag of the bill to near $3 trillion.
These reports aligned with an array of other looks at Trump's signature legislation with some other analyses offering estimates often topping $3 trillion.
Another way of looking at the bill is to assume that many of the short-term goodies in it are made permanent (which Washington has a long history of doing). That would push the price tag north of $5 trillion, according to groups like the Penn Wharton Budget Model and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget .
Either way, the influential CBO reports have led to a concerted campaign by Trump's White House to try to discredit the scorekeeper.
Just on Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered flimsy claims that the CBO was "historically wrong" and "has become partisan and political."
The second CBO report looking at tariffs implemented through May 13 offered a sort of mirror image conclusion (as well as a reaction from the White House).
That's because it concluded that tariffs could reduce primary deficits by $2.8 trillion over the next decade by accounting for both the revenue coming in, negative economic effects, and reduced debt interest payments.
As with pretty much everything in Washington, it's not quite that simple. The report looks at Trump's tariffs through a recently enacted pause on China on May 12 but before recent developments like a court fight over the legality of some of Trump's tariffs as well as new steel tariffs .
The analysis also didn't try to weigh Trump's promised additional "reciprocal" duties he says are coming in July.
The report also noted the up-and-down nature of tariffs and how long-term effects of tariffs of this magnitude are difficult to predict, as "there is little relevant empirical evidence on their effects" on things like trade volume and consumer behavior.
The report also foresees a cost for the US economy, with tariffs set to "reduce the size of the U.S. economy" and also lead to a potential inflation increase of 0.4 percentage points in 2025 and 2026.
Read more: What Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet
But the top-line tariff revenue estimate provided some limited new buttressing for the claim Trump has been making since the 2024 campaign that his tariff agenda could fund other priorities.
Tariffs have already brought in about $17.4 billion in April and over $20 billion in May , a significant uptick but not yet enough to make a significant piece of the government's revenue picture.
And this good news from the Trump team's perspective was noticed and earned some caveated endorsements. It was noted by Trump's budget chief and his deputy chief of staff , among others, even amid the larger campaign against the group.
Spokesperson Kush Desai likewise slammed what he called the CBO's "faulty" projections in a statement to Yahoo Finance but quickly added that any overall accounting "should stay consistent and also take CBO's tariff revenue estimate of $2.8 trillion at face value."
Ammunition for both sides of the debate
All in all, the ongoing political spotlight shining on the staid world of budget analysis has done little to change the central conclusion reached again and again that Trump's "big, beautiful bill" would lead to trillions in additional debt if it's passed.
And how the back-and-forth over the CBO affects the ongoing Capitol Hill debate remains far from clear.
Tesla ( TSLA ) CEO Musk recently called the bill "a disgusting abomination" over its high cost and has emerged as a new leader of sorts for fiscal conservatives who have voiced objections, often citing the CBO and other findings.
The case from the White House, meanwhile, has been to dismiss the CBO, suggesting that passage of Trump's legislation will spur huge economic growth that will quickly swamp the costs of tax cuts.
Russell Vought, the director of Trump's Budget Office, said in a call with reporters Wednesday that both the bill and tariffs are "part of a coherent fiscal agenda" and promised that the books would eventually balance because of those factors as well as economic growth, "reforms we can do ourselves" without Congress, and additional plans for spending cuts to come.
Overlooked by many in the White House on tariffs is how the next president — or Trump if he changes his mind, as he has done on varied tariffs since taking office — could quickly change the tariff revenue picture dramatically or strike them down entirely with executive actions.
Changing tax rates passed into law by Congress is much harder.
"These tariffs are highly, highly, highly uncertain, not just in their revenue impact because if they drive us into a recession, for example, or push up interest rates or move people away from the dollar," Goldwein added.
This post has been updated with additional developments.
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.