Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney have both been critical of the CBO report released Monday. | AP Photo White House White House tries to recover from CBO blow on health bill Trump's allies are hitting the airwaves to insist the harsh score is not a devastating setback to the House GOP plan to replace Obamacare.

The White House and Republicans from Capitol Hill are trying to minimize the fallout from the Congressional Budget Office’s harsh report on the GOP health plan, insisting they’re still full-steam ahead on scrapping and replacing Obamacare.

Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney fanned out on the airwaves, even as much of Washington was coping with an icy sludge, to push back against the report that predicted 24 million people would lose their health insurance under the Republican leadership-backed American Health Care Act.


“I don't believe the facts are correct,” Mulvaney said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I'm not just saying that because it looks bad for my political position. I say that based upon a track record of the CBO being wrong before and we believe the CBO is wrong now.”

Mulvaney, who joked with a snow-covered Capitol behind him that he was “happy to be here on a beautiful, warm, sunny day according to the Congressional Budget Office,” suggested that the CBO was out of its depth in predicting the health insurance markets and pointed to three-year-old Obamacare projections for this year that badly missed as proof.

While the CBO is “good at counting money, in and out, numbers, taxes, policies and so forth,” calculating how many individuals a piece of legislation will add or subtract from the insurance rolls is not its strong suit. “It's really, really hard to do this. We don't even try to do this at the OMB,” Mulvaney said. “That's how difficult it is.”

Mulvaney’s comments on the CBO seemed an effort at reinforcing the preemptive warnings from the repeal-and-replace legislation’s backers. House Speaker Paul Ryan said last week that he had warned Republican members of Congress to “get ready” for a bad CBO score because “we always know you’re never going to win a coverage beauty contest when it’s free market versus government mandates.”

And White House press secretary Sean Spicer sought to get out ahead of the impending CBO score at a press briefing last week, when he told reporters that “if you're looking to the CBO for accuracy, you're looking in the wrong place.”

Further muddying the waters of the CBO projection is the three-step procedure that Republicans have laid out for the repeal-and-replace process, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday morning. The American Health Care Act, which can circumvent a Democratic filibuster in the Senate via a process called reconciliation, is only step one, McCarthy said in an interview on Fox News, meaning the CBO score does not take into account the totality of the GOP healthcare plan.

While Republicans sought to push back against the CBO figure, Democrats in Congress seized on the report Tuesday to further accuse Republicans of attacking the poor and senior citizens to give the rich a tax cut.

At a press conference Tuesday morning, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi described the bill as "very, very troubling" and "very, very cruel.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared the CBO score "surprisingly scathing."

"Trumpcare is a wreck, and we all knew that before the Congressional Budget Office released its surprisingly scathing score last night," Schumer said. "The Republicans' own hand-picked CBO director confirmed what Democrats have said all along. Trumpcare would be a nightmare for the American people, causing tens of millions to lose coverage."

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the House Republican Conference’s chairwoman, was more forgiving to the CBO than some of her GOP colleagues in an interview with Hugh Hewitt, telling the conservative radio host that the score is “an indicator” that “we take very seriously. The CBO’s report is not all bad, she noted, pointing to its assessment that premiums and taxes will go down under the GOP proposal.

But McMorris Rodgers also told Hewitt that “we take issue with some of their projections.”

In a separate interview with Hewitt, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a critic of the legislation making its way through the House, said the CBO report “provides useful information” but cautioned that “the CBO director is not Moses. He’s not walking down from the mountaintop with stone tablets. And we should evaluate that useful information with a critical eye.”

Like McCarthy, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price blamed the CBO score on the fact that it examined only one portion of the larger GOP plan. A more full analysis of the American Health Care Act will paint a rosier picture of the legislation’s true impact, he said.

“If you look at our entire package that the CBO didn’t look at -- not because they’re bad folks, that’s the way the rules work -- they didn’t look at all the regulations that we believe ought to go away,” Price said. “They didn’t look at purchase across state lines or medical malpractice reform or all those things that, in their totality, create a system that actually works better for the American people.”

Madeline Conway contributed to this report.