President Donald Trump's plan to roll back taxes in the hope that doing so will generate robust economic growth with little impact on debt and deficits is "absurd," former Treasury Secretary and White House economic advisor Larry Summers said.

In fact, Summers added in an interview with CNBC, that had he been asked to present such a plan with the notion that it would pay for itself, he would have refused.

"If I had been asked by the White House to assert a proposition as demonstrably false as the claim that this plan would produce revenue, I would have resigned rather than put the credibility of the department behind a proposition that no one with real experience would believe was true," he said.

Summers served as head of the Treasury during the Bill Clinton administration and as senior economic advisor to President Barack Obama.

The cornerstone of Trumps' economic agenda is that, as well as simplification of the tax code, it will unlock growth, which was strong under Clinton but plodding under Obama.

In a proposal rolled out Wednesday by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic advisor, the number of individual tax brackets would be cut to three and the levels for wage earners across the board would be reduced.