Donald Trump’s campaign has enlisted influential conservative economists to revise his tax package and make it more politically palatable by slashing the $10 trillion sticker price. Their main targets: Lifting the top tax rate from Trump’s original plan and expanding the number of people who would have to pay taxes under it.

Trump’s initial proposal, rolled out with fanfare at Trump Tower in Manhattan last September, has been in the spotlight since he became the presumptive Republican nominee last week and promptly declared that it was only a starting point for any negotiations with congressional Democrats, should he become president.


But it turns out Trump’s team is open to revamping it far sooner than that; the campaign last month contacted at least two prominent conservative economists — Larry Kudlow, the CNBC television host, and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation and a longtime Wall Street Journal writer — to spearhead an effort to update the package.

“What we’ve been trying to do is help advise him a little bit to try to reduce the cost of the plan” and still encourage economic growth, Moore said in an interview.

Trump’s initial plan has come under criticism from both the right and left for vastly expanding the deficit, with the nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimating it would add $10 trillion to the federal deficit in the next decade. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has moved quickly to tattoo the plan’s steep price tag onto Trump, with her team holding a call on Monday calling it a reckless expansion of debt.

"This is the most risky, restless and regressive tax proposal ever put forward by a major presidential candidate," one of President Obama’s former top economic advisers, Gene Sperling, said on the Clinton campaign call.

The Trump team’s quiet outreach to Moore and Kudlow, even before the New York billionaire had wrapped up the GOP nomination, is a sign the campaign was seeking to shore up a possible general-election vulnerability early.

Over the weekend, Trump spoke openly of changing his tax plan on the Sunday shows. “The thing I'm going to do is make sure the middle class gets good tax breaks,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Because they have been absolutely shunned. The other thing, I'm going to fight very hard for business. For the wealthy, I think, frankly, it's going to go up. And you know what, it really should go up.”

The next day, on CNN, Trump tried to clarify that he wasn’t actually talking about raising rates on the wealthy, just raising them from his original plan. “If I increase it on the wealthy, they're still going to pay less than they pay now,” he said.

While Kudlow cast the changes he and Moore are recommending as “tweaking,” what he described would have an enormous financial impact. Kudlow said they had already resubmitted their revisions to the Tax Foundation, which he said was now preliminarily estimating that the package would expand the deficit by $3.8 trillion — a roughly 60 percent cut.

“The full effect of all the things we talked about would have a very important reduction in the deficit,” Kudlow said, adding, “The economic growth would be increased, as would jobs and wages.”

Trump has not offered many policy specifics in his campaign so far but his tax package was among his most detailed. It included eliminating federal income taxes for individuals making less than $25,000 and for married couples earning below $50,000, slashing the highest income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and cutting the business tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.

Some of those numbers could now shift, according to Kudlow, who stressed that the proposed changes he and Moore are drafting are simply “suggestions” for Trump.

“Mr. Trump has not signed off on any of this,” Kudlow cautioned.

Among their most notable revenue-generating recommendations is raising the top tax bracket higher from the 25 percent that Trump had originally proposed to 28 percent, according to Kudlow. That would still represent a substantial tax cut for the richest Americans.

Kudlow also said that the threshold for paying no income taxes could “be lowered a bit” — Trump would take 33 million low-income Americans off the rolls entirely — from the original proposed $50,000 level for married couples. He did not specify the new threshold.

In his initial rollout, Trump had promised that millions of households no longer paying taxes were going to get a one-page form to send to the Internal Revenue Service simply saying, “I win.”

Not every change Kudlow and Moore are drafting would result in more revenue. Kudlow said they were also suggesting that Trump keep the capital gains tax rate at 15 percent across all income levels; Trump’s original plan had that rate at 20 percent for those earning more than $150,000.

He also said they would recommend letting corporations use “immediate expensing of equipment” for tax purposes to spur investment and economic growth. This has become a top priority for many Republicans, though it wasn’t in Trump’s original plan.

“Eventually the candidate will make a call,” Kudlow said of the new proposals.

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Kudlow and Moore are well known voices in conservative economic circles. They are two of the founders, with economist and former Ronald Reagan adviser Art Laffer and former GOP presidential candidate Steve Forbes, of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, established last year to advance for conservative economic policies. The group met with multiple GOP presidential candidates in the last year, including Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina and Mike Huckabee.

The group’s imprint could help add credibility on the right to a revised Trump tax plan, after his original proposal came under attack from some Republicans as unrealistically large. By one measure, Trump’s proposed tax cut was four times the size of George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts.

Ryan Ellis, former tax policy director for Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, said such a proposal “drags down the entire effort at conservative tax reform to a circus level.”

“It’s simply not realistic,” Ellis said. “There’s no amount of entitlement reform that can pay for that, and there’s no amount of base broadening that can pay for that.”

The proposed revision — reducing the overall cost to the budget, putting more people back on the income tax rolls and expanding business “expensing” — appears to be an effort to put Trump more in line with the broader Republican consensus on tax policy.

Trump has been far more reticent than most Republicans to make changes to Social Security and Medicare, the biggest entitlement programs, instead talking about cutting back on more amorphous waste and abuse that most independent analysts agree don’t add up to significant savings.

But Kudlow suggested there was more spending cut details on the horizon, as well.

“There would also be a spending reduction piece as part of this overall package, which, frankly, would probably slice another $2 trillion” off the federal deficit, he said.

Brian Faler contributed to this report.