BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And I’m Brooke Gladstone. Since the early days of his campaign, Trump has thrived on his image as a dealmaker who will supercharge the American economy. Now that it's time for the Trump White House to demonstrate how it's going to pull it off, it's using economic forecasts to bolster its claims. Reportedly, the White House predicts GDP growth as high as 3 to 3-1/2%, higher growth than it’s seen in over a decade. And Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin stood by that number in an interview in February.

[CLIP]:  

TREASURY SECRETARY MNUCHIN:  I think it's very achievable. We believe that we can be competitive and get back to sustainable growth of 3% or more.

 [END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But Thursday’s release of the White House budget plan contained no details about projected economic growth.

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  It is incredibly unusual. Every administration, going back to at least Reagan has, in this version of the budget, included economic forecasts.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Catherine Rampell, columnist at the Washington Post, says it's not unusual for politicians to make generous projections of economic growth under their policies.

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  My general rule of thumb is that the more growth a politician promises, probably the worst their economic plan is. It’s a little counterintuitive but the reason why that more or less holds true is that they use these forecasts to help guide what they think is reasonable to ask for from Congress and also to project to the world what they think their policy agenda will actually achieve. Reagan was known for having a sort of imaginary cabinet member named Rosy Scenario, you may recall.

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

Rosy Scenario [LAUGHS] did not materialize, sadly. Her numbers were too strong.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But you do note that what the Trump administration is doing here is extraordinary. If the Trump administration is projecting between 3 and 3-1/2% growth, as a result of the implementation of his policies, how did he arrive at that number?

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  That's an excellent question.

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

Normally, the way that this process works is that career staffers at the Council of Economic Advisers put together a forecast, with input from people from Treasury, from the Office of Management and Budget, other people throughout the government. They’ve put together a model. They figure out, okay, what are our assumptions for labor force participation or productivity or inflation, and then they plug in all these numbers and then they spit out whatever their economic growth estimate is. This time, they did the reverse.

During the transition for Trump, members of the transition team worked with the career staffers and said, you guys just have to figure out what to plug into your model to come up with this result. Produce estimates that show 3 to 3-1/2% growth and then backfill everything else to get it to add up, which is unheard of, unheard of.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  How much latitude do the career professionals at the Council of Economic Advisers have in carrying out this instruction to reverse engineer the results?

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  My sources said that they complained a lot because they didn't view the results as likely to be credible ‘cause normally that is something that a White House cares about. If they’re way far off from what everybody else says, then people will laugh and say, why should we trust you? So the career staffers want to do work that they think is grounded in evidence credible to the outside world, but ultimately they don't get to decide. It’s the political appointees, in this case, the transition officials and now other economic advisers within the White House, not who would normally be the direct bosses of the CEA.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Setting aside, as you wrote in your column, the sheer intellectual dishonesty of this approach, there are long-term consequences. Describe ‘em.

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  The issue is that these numbers greatly overestimate what the economy will do and, therefore, will be used to justify tremendous tax cuts, as well as spending increases. Trump has proposed a historically large increase in the defense budget. If you assume that economic growth will be way [LAUGHS] faster than anybody else believes, then that means fewer people will be poor. Fewer people will be middle income, for that matter. They won't need help paying for health insurance, amongst other household necessities because, hey, we’re all gonna be rich. That's basically the bottom line of this forecast. They are assuming away any problems for American families.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But is it even feasible?

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  No, it’s not feasible. Even, for example, Glenn Hubbard, who was an economic advisor to Mitt Romney, to George W. Bush, he has said that sustained growth above 2.75% is not in any way realistic. And most economists that I’ve talked with say that that number, that upper bound that Glenn Hubbard gave is kind of ludicrous, as well.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  As you've noted, not only are the economic growth rates he's boasting astronomically high, they’re in conflict with the projections of other federal agencies. Given all of that, can we still expect Congress to buy it?

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  Well, typically we have sources of accountability that all parties have agreed on are more or less truthful, useful for providing us with data on how our policies are working out and what would happen if we took one option versus another. Those are things like the Congressional Budget Office, which does forecasting and estimates on how much bills will cost, as well as how they might affect the economy. And the unemployment rate comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  The BLS also produces the inflation numbers and a lot of other very important metrics for determining the health of the US economy. And there are a number of other statistical agencies, like the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis that similarly gather and distill data. But now, these very important institutions that serve both as a status update and a check on how well our politicians are doing have been discredited because sometimes they produce numbers that are inconvenient. So there are guardrails in place, procedural, regulatory barriers to prevent tampering with the data. One reason those have been put in place is that Richard Nixon tried to tamper with the data.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Isn’t there one way you can push the whole thing over the guardrail, which is simply starve those agencies of funds, not replace the professionals who leave through attrition or otherwise, because we’ve seen with the EPA and other kinds of statistics, the Congress or the White House simply says, we’re not going to fund that kind of research anymore?

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  Absolutely. I'm very concerned about gutting of statistical agencies because that kind of flies under the radar. And if the White House wanted to sabotage statistical collection that is the way that they would do it and, frankly, that's the way Congress has been doing it for the last several years. When I have spoken with alumni of these various statistical agencies, including past Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioners, they’re not worried about somebody coming in and moving a decimal point somewhere in the Unemployment Report. What they're worried about is funding cuts.

Funding cuts could have really bad effects for the robustness of the data. You need a minimum number of survey respondents in order for the numbers to like really mean anything, for there not to be an enormous margin of error, for example. So if you cut their funding, ultimately they'll either have to get rid of some of these data points that they produce entirely, and they have, like the Bureau of Economic Analysis has gotten rid of some data series that have to do with outsourcing because, hey, who cares about outsourcing? It’s not like that’s a hot topic right now.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Wow!

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  But their budget has been cut, so they have to choose between what kinds of reports and what kinds of data they can collect.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  What are the consequences if, say, for example, a budget passed based on a 3-1/2% growth rate?

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  There are a few likely outcomes. You get much more expensive policies than you would otherwise because you can kind of paper over the cost with this growth. Do people care about growth rates? I don’t know. You know, it's not exactly a kitchen table issue [LAUGHS] probably. But what I will say, if Rosie Scenario does not materialize, you will see further attempt to discredit the institutions that produce the inconvenient data because Trump is gonna say, oh, the Bureau of Economic Analysis says that growth is only 1%, I believe it’s 6%. They’re all liars and, therefore, we should defund them further. That's one scenario I can very easily see playing out.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Catherine, thank you very much.

CATHERINE RAMPELL:  Thanks for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Catherine Rampell is a columnist for the Washington Post.