Donald Trump’s bare-bones tax plan would cut rates — but add more than $10 trillion to the debt. His goal to trim the national debt to zero in eight years would require slashing all federal spending by two-thirds, even if he ditched the proposed tax cut. And he’s got no plans to trim Medicare or Social Security, the main drivers of spending.

Trump’s budget and policy proposals have resonated with the Republican base, even if elements of his plan run entirely counter to conservative economic orthodoxy. But taken together, they are a series of puzzle pieces that just don’t fit into a coherent whole, according to experts on both sides of the aisle.


While nothing about Trump’s policy platform could be called traditional, analyzing his fiscal policies is perhaps the most difficult, particularly given that some of them seem to work against each other.

“I don’t know that he’s really taken the time to understand the complexities of some of these areas of policy,” said Lanhee Chen, policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “I am concerned about that.”

Take his tax proposal. True, it could possibly boost growth with sharp reductions in rates. But it would add a staggering $10 trillion to the debt, according to the Tax Foundation, a notion that might give pause to conservatives like House Speaker Paul Ryan who are typically comfortable with large tax cuts. And Democrats would hate what they’d see as a giveaway to the wealthy that would also empty federal coffers used to pay for prized social programs.

Meanwhile, Trump has been making other costly, if not necessarily detailed, pledges to “rebuild our military” and “rebuild the infrastructure.”

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Trump’s policies would add an additional $11.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade, building a burden that could drastically increase borrowing costs and weigh down the U.S. economy.

“Certainly with the promises he’s put out so far, he would do more damage to the fiscal position of the country than … any one set of policies that I’ve seen working on this issue,” said Maya MacGuineas, the group’s president.

Trump’s advisers appear to relish the campaign’s outsider status.

“It’s kind of a question of whether people want to take the risk of change, or whether they feel good about the way the direction of the country is going,” said Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to the Trump campaign and a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. A request for comment from the campaign was not returned.

Analysis of Trump’s proposals has been difficult, in part because he has yet to fully flesh out his agenda, and also because his statements about policy tend to lack coherence. For example, he told The Washington Post in April that he would eliminate the $19 trillion national debt over eight years, a mathematically bewildering task. A few weeks later, he backtracked, telling Fortune only that he would try to pay down “a percentage of it.”

But Trump has not indicated many instances in which he would cut government spending, often citing a need to cut “waste, fraud and abuse.” He’s also frequently pointed to his plans to renegotiate existing trade deals, though that wouldn’t significantly reduce the deficit, even with new economic growth. And like most Republicans, Trump has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act to save money, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said doing so would increase budget deficits by $137 billion over the next decade — and, according to a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study in June, would also cause 24 million people to lose their health insurance.

Growth might be hard to come by under a Trump presidency. An analysis from Moody’s Analytics found that Trump’s policies would push the country into a “lengthy recession,” with 3.5 million jobs lost, stagnant incomes and falling stock prices and home values. Moody’s said Trump’s proposals were “fiscally unsound.”

The main drivers of economic harm, Moody’s said, would be increased debt, higher interest rates, a contracting labor force — due to mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — and the impact of proposed tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports.

“As a matter of governance, he’s going to have to rethink some of these things,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director and adviser to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, who now leads the conservative American Action Forum.

Underscoring the dismay over Trump’s proposals, Henry Paulson, Treasury secretary under George W. Bush, recently denounced the candidate.

“Trump repeatedly, blatantly and knowingly makes up or gravely distorts facts to support his positions or create populist divisions,” Paulson wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post, in which he announced his intention to vote for Hillary Clinton. “Simply put, a Trump presidency is unthinkable.”

“The Hank Paulson article in the Post,” one former Bush administration official told POLITICO, “summarizes the view of a lot of Republicans.”

That person, like a number of former GOP officials who served in budget and economic policy roles in the White House or Congress, declined to discuss the policies being pushed by the party’s presumptive nominee, potentially signaling broad discomfort with Trump.

Moore dismissed outside analyses of Trump’s fiscal policies, saying the campaign wasn’t finished crafting the candidate’s program. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget report is “totally ridiculous,” he said. “You can’t score a plan that doesn’t exist.” Moore called Paulson, who oversaw the 2008 Wall Street bailout, “probably the worst Treasury secretary in American history.”

Trump’s advisers espouse a deep confidence in the campaign’s platform.

“It is oriented towards, No. 1, growth. Growth, growth, growth,” Moore said. “No. 2 is getting back to the government paying its bills, balancing the budget as quickly as possible.”

Sam Clovis, Trump’s campaign co-chair and top economic adviser, said at a conference in May that Trump’s plans would fuel robust economic growth, leading to a federal surplus of trillions of dollars.

Such claims have been widely dismissed as implausible.

Economic policy experts were also deeply disturbed by comments Trump made in May about negotiating the value of U.S. debt, which many took to mean having the government default — an unthinkable scenario that would upend the global financial system.

Trump later clarified that he would not ask creditors to accept less than what the government fully owed. But his comments, which could destabilize financial markets if uttered from the Oval Office, continue to cause concern.

“He should never, ever, ever utter those horrible words again,” Holtz-Eakin said.

Even GOP lawmakers who have sought to be supportive of Trump were puzzled with that statement.

“I don’t think that was something that was intended to be how you deal with our federal debt,” Sen. Bob Corker said. The Tennessee Republican, who has since withdrawn his name from vice presidential consideration, said Trump appeared to confuse work from his business background with federal fiscal policy.

Trumpeting his business success, Trump has called himself “the king of debt,” and he and his supporters often cite his business acumen as reason to support him.

But understanding business and the federal budget are two very different things.

“The last super successful businessman elected to be president on that credential was Herbert Hoover,” said Holtz-Eakin. “Things didn’t go very well for him.”

