At a cocktail reception in Bangor last Tuesday, Rep. Bruce Poliquin revealed that he wants to eliminate the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan agency that Congress relies on to provide estimates of the effects of major legislation. According to Poliquin, the reason he hasn’t moved to replace the CBO with “private consulting firms” is that the political moment isn’t yet right to “shoot the referee.”

The first question following Poliquin’s speech to an event hosted by the Maine Heritage Policy Center last week was about remaking or removing the CBO. From a recording of his remarks provided by an attendee, we know that Poliquin responded with some harsh words.

“First of all, whenever you’re going to pass a bill in the House and the Senate, the Congressional Budget Scores it. You know what they do? It’s scored statically. It’s cash in, cash out. So, if you’re cutting taxes, you’re receiving less revenue, so it adds to the deficit, but what they don’t do is dynamic scoring, which means: Does it add to growth? Does it mean people will invest more and grow more and more jobs and more money and therefore there’s more tax revenue coming in? And that’s what they should score and they don’t do that,” said Poliquin.

Poliquin is wrong. The CBO has conducted dynamic scoring (over the strong objections of many Democrats) since 2015. That was the same year that Republican congressional leaders installed a new director, Keith Hall, a former Bush administration economist and a strong ideological ally.

Poliquin, like others who have criticized the CBO lately, seems most upset about its scoring of the health care repeal bills.

“So here’s what happens, is that you get this health insurance bill coming up and they say well 23 million people are going to be uninsured. Well let’s think about this. Half of those people were forced to buy insurance or pay a fine to the IRS, well I guess if you don’t force them to do that they might not choose to have that insurance. That’s the stupidest thing that they score that way,” said Poliquin.

This is another lie. As PolitiFact and others have noted, the majority of those projected to lose insurance under the Republicans’ American Health Care Act would be cut from Medicaid due to the deep cuts to that program contained in the bill (and which Poliquin claimed earlier in this speech don’t exist).

Of the rest, some small amount may choose not to purchase insurance for non-economic reasons, but most would be priced out of the market due to slashed subsidies and skyrocketing premiums caused by the repeal. Estimates from AARP show a senior making $25,000 a year in rural Maine would face a premium increase of $12,701. No one could afford that.

Despite his opposition to the independent agency, Poliquin voted with Republican leadership in the House against recent attempts by the conservative House Freedom Caucus to weaken the CBO.

Rather than being swayed by the arguments from his allies on the right at the American Enterprise Institute and in the opinion pages of the National Review in favor of maintaining the CBO, however, these votes were apparently just a feint. Poliquin actually wants to go much farther than even these extreme proposals in dismantling Congress’ ability to analyze legislation. He’s just biding his time and looking for the right moment.

“I’ve talked to Newt Gingrich about this specifically, about a month and a half ago. He said ‘Bruce what we need to do is drop a bill that folks can get behind to replace the CBO with private enterprise, private consultant firms that we hire to do real studies,’” said Poliquin. “Here’s the problem: Right now where we stand on the ground now the last thing we want to do is shoot the referee. I hear you, I’m with you completely and I bet everyone else in this room is. The question is: When do we do that?”

It’s noteworthy that Polquin is so far to the right of his own leadership in seeking to dismantle the CBO. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree that doing so “would impair the institution’s ability to function” and give the power over determining the effects of legislation to the more-partisan mechanisms of the executive branch, further empowering President Donald Trump.

It’s also unfortunate that Poliquin either doesn’t understand or is willing to lie about how the CBO and its estimates work.

But what is perhaps most interesting in these remarks is that it’s clear Poliquin knows exactly what he’s doing. He has no problem with shooting the referee. He’s just wondering when he should pull the trigger.

The preceding originally appeared on mainebeacon.com, a website and podcast created by progressive group the Maine People’s Alliance.