A conservative think tank has said the formula the Trump administration used to calculate tariffs that are wreaking havoc on the economy contains an egregious error. When confronted with the allegations, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins doubled down.

CNN’s Jake Tapper noted that the Trump tariffs that went into effect Wednesday have “wiped $6.6 trillion of wealth off of Wall Street” when he interviewed Rollins on Sunday’s State of the Union. He later pointed out that economists at the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently uncovered what they say is an error in the administration’s math.

“Conservative economists at the American Enterprise Institute say that when the Trump administration came up with these tariff rates, you should have used as a basis the elasticity in the response of import prices to tariffs, instead of retail prices,” Tapper said. “And AEI, a conservative group, says, because the Trump administration mixed that up, the entire computation is wrong and these tariff rates are set four times too high.”

AEI economists Kevin Corinth and Stan Veuger argue in a recent paper that had the Trump administration used a correct calculation, then it “would reduce the tariffs assumed to be applied by each country to the United States to about a fourth of their stated level.”

“Our view is that the formula the administration relied on has no foundation in either economic theory or trade law,” Corinth and Veuger write.

“They make a compelling case,” Tapper said, asking Rollins, “Is that true?”

In defending the administration, Rollins attacked AEI as hostile toward Trump: “AEI has never been a friend of the president’s. They have never been a friend of an America first agenda. They have never come alongside and helped us effectuate what we believe is today’s conservative vision for America.”

“And they’re just wrong on this,” Rollins claimed without providing proof. She then said that Trump has “the smartest, most incredible economists, businessmen on our side.”

“I have 100 percent faith in the formulas that they used and how they came up with these numbers,” she said before admitting she had not even read the AEI article.

“I have not read [it],” she said.

“Well, I’d ask you to check it out,” Tapper responded. “You should read it.”

“The reason I ask is because a lot of people are questioning the level of scholarship here behind how these tariffs were done,” he continued.

A Trump official familiar with the tariff plans told Rolling Stone that ahead of his inauguration, Trump “wanted the numbers to be huge” on tariffs. “The president isn’t a number-crunching guy, per se, but President Trump strongly demanded big numbers that would make other countries treat us fairly,” the source said. “And I think you can see today that those numbers are huge.”

The numbers are huge, but according to AEI’s economists, they may be four times too huge.