Megabill price tag

House fiscal hawks want a megabill price tag before passage. They probably won’t get it.  

Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper is not expected to turn around a total cost estimate in time for a House passage vote.

By Meredith Lee Hill and Jennifer Scholtes

House Republicans don’t expect to receive a final cost estimate for their “one big, beautiful bill” before GOP leaders plan to put the massive legislation on the floor.

Three Republicans with direct knowledge of the talks confirmed that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has conveyed it won’t be able to finish calculating the total price tag of the megabill before Thursday.

That’s enraging GOP hard-liners, including Freedom Caucus members, who are demanding more changes to the measure they say “fails to actually honor our promise to significantly correct the spending trajectory of the federal government.”

Further complicating the ability of the CBO to expeditiously tally the cost, House Republicans are continuing to tweak policies in the more than 1,100-page bill, both on paper and in private deals with GOP holdouts threatening to vote against passage. Final bill text likely won’t be ready until the House Rules Committee meets at 1 a.m. Wednesday morning to pave the way for floor consideration of tax and domestic policy package — perhaps as soon as later that same day.

While the House doesn’t need the official cost estimate from Congress’ scorekeeper to send the measure over to the Senate, fiscal hawks want to make sure the bill includes enough “savings” policies, including spending cuts and new revenue, to balance out the $3.8 trillion worth of tax cuts included in the bill.

Hard-liners huddled with the CBO chief last week, demanding to see what the office predicted for the bill’s effect on federal Medicaid spending and coverage — and if states that chose not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would be incentivized to expand under certain proposals being considered. CBO told those lawmakers it may be able to provide those specific estimates by early this week.

The CBO is in charge of predicting how much non-tax policies in a bill would shrink or grow the federal deficit. Another official scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, handles the tax estimates.

Together, the two forecasters have delivered full cost estimates for eight of the 11 pieces of the party-line megabill central to enacting President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. While CBO works to finish cost estimates for the remaining slices of the measure, the budget office has already informed Republican lawmakers in writing that those pieces meet the deficit targets Republicans laid out in the budget framework they approved last month.