Some of the recent attacks are different in kind. Or, some are. Spicer told reporters, “If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place”—a classic sort of gripe about results. But Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, said, “I love the folks at the CBO, they work really hard. They do. Sometimes we ask them to do stuff that they're not capable of doing.” In other words, CBO isn’t just wrong on the details here; it’s structurally incapable of producing analysis of bills like the health-care proposal.

Newt Gingrich, a close Trump ally whose lack of an official position allows (or encourages) him to make more extreme statements, went further. “They should abolish the Congressional Budget Office. It is corrupt. It is dishonest. It was totally wrong on ObamaCare by huge, huge margins,” he told Fox News. “I don't trust a single word they have published and I don't believe them.”

These attacks are hard to take at face value. Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, “strenuously” disputes CBO’s approach to the bill. The current director of the CBO was chosen after Republicans pushed out the prior chief, a Democratic appointee, and chose Keith Hall. Hall’s selection was strongly backed by the Republican budget chief in the House, who said, “Keith Hall will bring an impressive level of economic expertise and experience to the Congressional Budget Office … His vast understanding of economic and labor market policy will be invaluable to the work of CBO and the important roll it will continue to play as Congress seeks to enact policies that support a healthy and growing economy.” That budget chief? Tom Price.

The fact that Democrats and Republicans each took issue with the specific methods is, arguably, a positive sign—CBO was created to produce nonpartisan analysis, so it would stand to reason that both parties would find CBO’s scores less accommodating of political priorities at times. The push to discredit, rather than reform, CBO, is more worrisome. (It is not entirely new—The Wall Street Journal proposed abolishing CBO in 2014.)

As Peter Suderman has written, the CBO was created because Congress grew increasingly fed up with the executive branch holding a monopoly on analysis of big-ticket items during the 1960s and 1970s:

This was the essential problem that Congress was trying to solve: a powerful executive branch with incentives to offer conveniently misleading, overly rosy projections about the costs and budgetary impacts of major federal expenses like war and entitlements. Congressional frustration boiled over during the Nixon administration in a dispute over impoundment (which as Joyce explains was less about spending limits and more about which branch had the authority to enforce spending limits), and the Congressional Budget Office was born.

Presumably making America great again does not entail emulating the worst excesses of the Vietnam era or the Nixon administration. Yet this is what the Trump White House is pushing toward: A return to a situation where there is no independent, nonpartisan arbiter for budget bills, and the president’s analysis has to be taken as granted. Given the White House’s difficulty with truthfulness, this is a questionable proposition.