Working the refs is a time-honored tradition in both sports and politics. But the Republican defense of The American health Care Act has thus far been a disaster.

Since last week — even before the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had finished its scoring of the bill — the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been savaging the CBO in the most haphazard and contradictory terms imaginable.

Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, said critics of the GOP plan were falling into an insidious “trap.”

“You’re worried about getting people covered,” Mulvaney said.

You don’t say.

In one breath on Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price declared the CBO analysis “not believable.” In the next, he acknowledged that he had not yet read the CBO’s scorecard.

What?

Meanwhile, the bill’s author, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., pronounced himself “pretty encouraged” by the CBO’s scoring of the bill. Presumably Ryan was referring to the CBO’s projection that the plan would reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion — achieved by cutting Medicaid and subsidies to other programs — and not the fact that it would kick 24 million Americans off their health insurance by 2026.

As Mulvaney said: This is a great bill, so long as you don’t get sidetracked with a red herring such as how it affects people’s health care coverage.

Make no mistake, the CBO is not omnipotent or infallible. It badly missed the mark when projecting sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act, and it didn’t see The Great Recession coming.

But Republicans could have attached their own cost projections and analysis to the bill when they unveiled it last week. They didn’t — because they have no idea what it would do to premiums, government expenses or health care markets.

That’s understandable, since the party failed to hold a single hearing on the proposal, assemble any experts to comment on its likely effects, or gather any information whatsoever on how some of its more unique provisions — like a 30 percent premium penalty on people who don’t maintain their health coverage — might affect insurance markets.

Those things would not have prevented or superseded a CBO scoring of the Republicans’ bill. But they would have conveyed a commitment to answer tough questions and given the bill’s supporters a leg to stand on while critiquing aspects of the CBO analysis they didn’t like.

Instead, the party opted to preemptively bash the CBO, argued that health care coverage wasn’t the point, and capped it all off by simultaneously praising and deriding the CBO’s analysis of the bill.

The only thing in worse shape than Trumpcare right now is the Republicans’ defense of it.