The White House has always released economic projections to show where things are headed and how their own budget proposals relate to it, but the Trump White House is unlike any other that came before it.
The Washington Post first reported this morning that the Trump regime will not be releasing any projections this summer because there will probably be no good way to spin the state of things.
The White House is supposed to unveil a federal budget proposal every February and then typically provides a “mid-session review” in July or August with updated projections on economic trends such as unemployment, inflation and economic growth.
Budget experts said they were not aware of any previous White House opting against providing forecasts in this “mid-session review” document in any other year since at least the 1970s. [...]
“It gets them off the hook for having to say what the economic outlook looks like,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who served as an economic adviser to the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.).
For their part, White House officials who spoke to the Washington Post say they won't release projections because the economy is too volatile to make projections, but that won't stop the Labor or Commerce Departments or the Congressional Budget Office from releasing them. The Trump White House simply doesn't want to release their own numbers to maintain some level of plausible deniability.
This decision not to release their own numbers makes more sense if you allow for the possibility that the White House does not actually see a quick, V-shaped recovery coming.
They keep saying (as recently as in the past week) that's going to happen, but if they truly believed that why wouldn't they release those numbers?
To say they won't make projections because there's no way their projections could be accurate at a time like this would only be plausible in an administration that routinely operates in good faith, but the Trump White House never does. But in any case, saying their projections couldn't be accurate in July means their current projection for a quick recovery also couldn't be accurate.