E&W Blog

Today, President Biden will sign the so-called Inflation Reduction Act before the release of the final Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score, which lays out how much a bill will cost taxpayers.

Despite not having final numbers from CBO, Democrats are already claiming that this bill will reduce the deficit. Yet we know the cost of government programs are underestimated while profits are overestimated. Just look at the federal student loan program. It was supposed to generate $100 billion in revenue. Taxpayers were told to expect a return on their investment. But a recent Government Accountability Office report found the federal student loan program COST taxpayers more than $200 billion. The Education Department’s budget was off by $311 billion.

Sixty-one percent of this budget error was due to faulty assumptions about borrowers. What assumptions are federal scorekeepers making when scoring legislation and, in the face of such severe miscalculations, how can taxpayers and lawmakers trust what they’re being told?

Americans need to know the real costs of this bill, not best guesses or inaccurate estimates. Taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent—and that it is spent well.