Lawmakers praised the Congressional Budget Office on the 40th anniversary of its founding on Tuesday, even as some Republicans are trying to drive out the director and change the way the independent office estimates the budgetary impact of legislation.
After taking over both chambers of Congress in January, House Republicans instituted a rule change that would require the CBO to use “dynamic scoring” in estimating the budget effects of tax legislation. That means predicting how much economic activity a tax cut would spur, and then counting the positive budget boost from it.
Some Congressional Republicans also want to replace Douglas W. Elmendorf as director of the CBO after many on the right took issue with his estimates on the Affordable Care Act.
But those battles were pushed beneath the surface Tuesday as congressional leaders praised the agency for decades of nonpartisan refereeing.
“You all bring tremendous skill to a really tough job and I’ve seen first hand that you all share a real commitment to the work and responsibility that you have,” said Rep. Tom Price, Georgia Republican and chair of the House Budget Committee. “Please know that we have the greatest amount of respect for your pivotal contributions to our work.”
Mr. Elmendorf, who has served as the director of CBO since 2009, is on the hot seat with Republicans, but his predecessors as director used the anniversary celebration to praise his work.
When asked for advice for future directors, Alice Rivlin, the first director of the CBO, replied, “be as much like Doug Elmendorf as you can,” drawing applause from the CBO employees in the room.
“The budget committees are CBO’s first and most important clients in Congress. They are also our most important overseers, explainers and defenders,” Mr. Elmendorf said. “We are so appreciative of their support every day.”
This isn’t the first time Congress has pressured the CBO to use dynamic scoring, which Democrats called “voodoo economics” earlier this year. Previous directors of the budget agency said they faced off with lawmakers on how they would compile their reports on the budget effects of legislation.
“I was basically told … if CBO didn’t do dynamic scoring, I wasn’t going to be the director,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, who served as the director of the CBO from 2003 to 2005 and is currently the president of the American Action Forum. “They didn’t exactly say it that way, but it came across.”
The CBO does not generally use dynamic scoring because it wouldn’t be feasible for all bills, and most of them would have negligible macroeconomic effects. The estimates can also be highly uncertain.
June E. O’Neill, director of the CBO from 1995 to 1999, said that CBO may not be the best place to institute a dynamic scoring model, given that outside economists look at the effects of bills on the economy all the time.
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“Doing all of that is of course time consuming and that’s probably, it’s desirable but I don’t know whether CBO is the only organization in town that could actually or should actually be doing this,” she said.
But the agency has occasionally released reports that include dynamic scoring, including for the 2013 Senate immigration bill. The CBO said since the biggest effect of the bill was more legal labor, it made sense to calculate the budget effects, which turned out to be very positive.
Mr. Elmendorf last year had also committed to providing a dynamic score for major tax overhaul legislation.
Mr. Holtz-Eakin said the problem he faced during his tenure was that lawmakers felt the CBO wasn’t being responsive enough to Congress. He said that, while the budget office is an independent, non-partisan agency, it still needs to meet the needs of lawmakers.
• Jacqueline Klimas can be reached at jklimas@washingtontimes.com.
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