CBO Director Keith Hall participates in a media briefing January 24, 2017.

Republicans have very good reason to fear what the Congressional Budget Office is probably going to say about Trumpcare: every analysis by independent health and economic think tanks has shown it's going to take insurance away from millions and cost the treasury bigly. Because they know from experience that the CBO chief they hand picked, Keith Hall, seems to actually stick to his extremely conservative bonafides—especially when it comes down to matters relating to the deficit. And even though they've done everything to cook the books in their favor, Hall won't play along.

He’s a measured, conservative labor economist who worked at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Bureau of Labor Statistics under President George W. Bush. […] He was appointed to head CBO as Republicans in Congress revised rules for how the office would assess the impacts of legislation — a switch to what’s known as “dynamic scoring,” which lets CBO incorporate broader economic effects of proposed policy changes. Yet Hall’s use of that technique hasn’t always resulted in estimates that help the GOP agenda. […] And in one highly significant report in December—which set up the possible upcoming clash with the Republican Congress — Hall’s CBO said it wouldn’t count skimpy health plans as coverage in its scores. In other words, people with limited health care benefits that are unlikely to protect them against expensive or catastrophic medical events won't meet the CBO standards for health coverage. That means the CBO score of a Republican plan is almost certain to be less favorable than that of Obamacare.

Hence the determined effort by Republicans to discredit the CBO's eventual report before it hits the ground, which should be sometime next week. But the whole sorry mess proves again how remarkable it is that Paul Ryan—wunderkind wonk and intellectual light of the GOP—can't even get his numbers to work out when he's set everything up in his favor.