Former President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council director has slipped from being the voice of reason on inflation to going full Cocaine Bear by screeching that President Trump was killing people with his economic agenda.

You can’t make this up.

Economist Larry Summers waved around a ridiculous Yale Budget Lab report to seethe July 6 to ABC’s This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos that Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) “will kill, over ten years, 100,000 people. That is two thousand days of death like we’ve seen in Texas this weekend...In my 70 years, I've never been as embarrassed for my country on July 4th.”

Yes, Summers actually exploited the tragic deaths of at least 90 people who were killed by the disastrous floods in Texas to score political cheap shots at the president and his allies. “Tone-deaf” doesn’t even begin to describe Summers’s insane argument. Of course, the smug lefty Snuffleupagus — er, Stephanopoulos — didn’t seem to mind, since he too tried to pin political blame on Trump for the Texas tragedy.

Summers also explicitly contradicted himself. He first claimed that the BBB would instigate “[m]ore inflation, higher interest rates, more risk of Fed raising interest rates and run the risk of recession, more stagflation.” He then did a complete switcheroo later by admitting he really doesn’t know what’s going to happen: “None of us can forecast what's going to happen to economic growth.” Uh, what?

When CNN State of the Union co-host Dana Bash tried to whip out the Yale Budget Lab against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent July 6, he immediately pointed out the ideological makeup of the staff and advisory board that ultimately compromises its objectivity as an economic authority. “This week, I actually went on their website. They're all ex-Biden officials, so I think we can discount everything they say.” Stephanopoulos didn’t bother disclosing those details, or the fact that Summers himself is a member of the Yale Budget Lab advisory board. 

Sec. Scott Bessent on the "Yale Budget Lab" analysis: "This week, I actually went on their website. They're all ex-Biden officials, so I think we can discount everything they say... What we have here is a middle class and working class bill."pic.twitter.com/qyYV9Aiqe4

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) July 7, 2025

MRC Business followed up on Bessent’s argument and discovered that top leadership within the Yale Budget Lab were in fact former employees of the Biden administration. This included the following:

• Yale Budget Lab President and Co-Founder Natasha Sarin: Previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and later as a Counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Sarin is also a reported Biden donor and was recently a focus of a NewsBusters investigation exposing Bloomberg Opinion columnist Alexis Leondis for dubiously sending the Treasury Department Q&A questions in advance of an interview with Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Lily Batchelder, of which Sarin assisted in editing her answers. 
• Executive Director Martha Gimbel: Previously served as Senior Advisor for Biden’s White House Council of Economic Advisers.
• Director of Economics Ernie Tedeschi: Previously served as Biden’s Chief Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
• Associate Director of Economic Analysis Harris Eppsteiner: Previously served as Special Assistant to the Chairman and Research Economist at Biden’s White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Bessent excoriated Summers in a thread on X for turning “a human tragedy into a political cudgel. Such remarks are feckless and deeply offensive.” He continued: “If he is unwilling or unable to acknowledge the cruelty of his remarks, [his affiliated nonprofit and for-profit organizations] should consider Harvard's example and make his unacceptable rhetoric grounds for dismissal.”

Today, former Treasury Secretary @LHSummers showed why he was forced to step down as president of @Harvard: a lack of humanity and judgment. 1/4

— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) July 7, 2025

Summers could be just trying to re-ingratiate himself with the leftists he’s angered over the years for predicting (correctly) that President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus would set inflation into overdrive. Perhaps being an honest liberal doesn’t pay dividends in his line of work. C'est la vie.