When Democratic leaders conditioned the passage of their Build Back Better (BBB) social spending bill on numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), they put their party’s entire agenda in the hands of economists who had already infamously denied the financial impact of climate change.

Now, the same Republican-led office is effectively denying the existence of its own previous estimates of savings from an enforcement initiative that would compel rich people to fork over their unpaid taxes. The CBO’s decision to pretend its own analyses don’t exist could be used by corporate Democrats as a rationale for dooming their party’s already pared-back health care, climate, and anti-poverty legislation.

At the same time, corporate Democrats are deploying a budgetary trick that will allow the CBO to decide that a massive tax cut for the wealthy will not cost anything at all.