Senate Majority Leader John Thune is signaling that changes are likely to the House's version of President Trump's "big, beautiful bill." (Getty Images)
Senate Republicans will now get their chance to tweak and change the legislation, and have vowed to do so, despite warnings from Trump to reshape the bill as little as possible.
Congressional Republicans have largely scoffed at the agency’s findings, arguing that the CBO doesn’t include expected economic growth or other factors into its scoring of the bill.
"I don't care what the CBO says," Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told Fox News Digital. "They're irrelevant to me. They were biased before. They've been biased in other things, but all the numbers speak for themselves."
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Sen. Ron Johnson talks with reporters in the U.S. Capitol after the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on May 22, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, agreed, and contended that it was "time to discuss the CBO being more damn accurate."
Still, some Republicans believe the CBO serves a purpose.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she didn’t believe the agency should be done away with, adding "we need to have a source for scores."
"We kind of go back and forth in terms of condemning CBO because we hate their score, or praising CBO because we like the outcome," she said. "And I think that's what we're seeing a lot of right now, is looking at that CBO score and saying, ‘That's not real.’"
Other lawmakers questioned what the alternative would be. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital, "We need something," but acknowledged that he felt the agency was biased, and that both parties used scores "to our manipulation."
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Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., believes that the agency’s score was wildly incorrect. Still, he is one of the main antagonists of the current bill because it does not go far enough to achieve deep spending cuts.
The lawmaker told Fox News Digital that he believed the 50-year-old agency would soon be a relic of the past.
"I think just AI is gonna replace them," he said. "I'm using AI all the time to do the sensitivity analysis. I don't need CBO to do these sensitivity analyses anymore, I can do it myself."
Alex Miller is a writer for Fox News Digital covering the U.S. Senate.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-challenge-irrelevant-budget-office-critiques-trumps-beautiful-bill