Earlier this week, we noted that the right-wing media were baselessly claiming that a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate on discretionary spending authorized by the health care reform legislation indicated that reform will “cost $115 billion more than we thought,” thus “wip[ing] out” promised deficit reductions. We pointed out that those claims didn't make sense, as the funds in question would only be spent if Congress separately approved them through the budget process, just as they would for any other spending bill, and that spending would only increase the deficit if it wasn't offset with spending cuts or revenue increases.

CBO director Douglas Elmendorf has since issued a statement that further debunks the right wing's claims. Apparently, the vast majority of these discretionary funds would simply continue existing health care programs at their current funding levels, meaning that the spending was already factored into CBO's baseline forecasts even before the bill's passage:

The potential discretionary costs identified two days ago include many items whose funding would be a continuation of recent funding levels for health-related programs or that were previously authorized and that PPACA would authorize for future years. (For example, those potential costs include $39 billion authorized for Indian health services that already receive appropriations every year.) CBO estimates that the amounts authorized for those items exceed $86 billion over the 10-year period (out of the roughly $105 billion total shown in the table provided yesterday). Thus, CBO's discretionary baseline, which assumes that 2010 appropriations are extended with adjustments for anticipated inflation, already accounts for much of the potential discretionary spending under PPACA. That is one of the reasons that potential discretionary effects are shown separately from effects on revenues and mandatory spending in CBO's cost estimates.

So of the $105 billion in authorized discretionary spending in the bill, CBO was already anticipating that $86 billion would be spent. That leaves $19 billion in new authorized discretionary spending, plus roughly $10 billion in implementation costs, for a total of less than $3 billion in new spending a year over ten years. And again, Congress needs to separately approve all of these funds (which they won't necessarily do), and can choose to offset them.

I wonder how Fox & Friends' efforts to trigger an “investigation” into the CBO over this are going...