A large group of House Republicans will meet this week with Congressional Budget Office Director Phillip Swagel as the GOP races to advance another party-line policy bill — and overcome disagreements over how to pay for it.
Swagel leads Capitol Hill’s nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, which calculates the official price tags and economic impacts of legislation. He will address the conservative Republican Study Committee at its weekly lunch Wednesday, according to an invite obtained by POLITICO.
The huddle comes as Speaker Mike Johnson and fellow GOP leaders are gathering with House Budget Committee Republicans at Camp David to plot a strategy for convincing skeptical deficit hawks to greenlight a filibuster-skirting reconciliation bill paid for largely with cuts to so-called fraud across Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs.
Even if rank-and-file Republicans go along with the plan, however, those cuts to “fraud” that leaders are envisioning won’t be enough to offset the entire price tag under under CBO’s current scoring methods. Fiscal conservatives are demanding every dollar spent is immediately offset with corresponding spending cuts — including the Trump administration’s request that Congress approve at least tens of billions of funding for the Iran war.
Republicans in recent weeks have tried to explore whether Swagel would consider a taking different approach to scoring the fraud cuts expected in the package, to little avail. They could try again at the meeting Wednesday.
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