WASHINGTON -- The House Budget Committee launched a "comprehensive review" of the Congressional Budget Office earlier this year, a series of five hearings examining the nonpartisan number crunchers.
The team of analysts has faced sharp criticism from White House budget director Mick Mulvaney and others, who portray its recent economic forecasts as too pessimistic and its budget deficit projections as unreasonably high. Its predictions relating to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act also have been assailed.
In May, Mulvaney suggested that CBO staff members have political biases and told the Washington Examiner that the agency's time "has probably come and gone."
In July, members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus tried and failed to abolish the CBO Budget Analysis Division.
Wednesday was the fourth of the five hearings, and it was "Member Day" -- an opportunity for any member of Congress to raise concerns about the office.
Committee Chairman Steve Womack, a Republican from Rogers, said he hoped the hearing would "give our members the proper and correct forum with which to be able to address their concerns."
Only three lawmakers showed up to testify. Of those, two criticized the agency.
U.S. Rep. Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, said more transparency is needed.
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He has introduced legislation that he calls the CBO Show Your Work Act. It would require the agency to post online "each fiscal model, policy model, and data preparation routine used by the Congressional Budget Office in estimating the costs and other fiscal, social, or economic effects of legislation" as well as "the data, programs, models, assumptions, and other details" underlying each of its estimates.
If some of the information is proprietary and can't be released, the agency would have to provide details explaining the reasons for the omission.
As much as possible, the underlying data should be publicly available, Davidson said. "It could be PhD-level algorithms or a Magic 8 ball. But whatever they do, they could show it to the world. The goal is to strengthen transparency and therefore accountability and, in the long run, accuracy," he said.
"We have companies making million-dollar decisions with better support than we're making trillion-dollar decisions with," he added.
The CBO faced particularly sharp criticism after predicting that 21 million people would enroll in Affordable Care Act health exchanges by the year 2016. The estimate was based on the assumption that the health care law would be declared constitutional. Instead, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision, ultimately enabling states to opt out of then-President Barack Obama's signature piece of legislation. The number served that year ended up about 10.4 million.
U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., who sought last year to cut CBO funding in half, noted the problems with the enrollment estimates and raised doubts about the CBO's effectiveness.
"There is no empirical data to show congressional decision-making has improved as a result of the CBO. However, it is safe to say fiscal responsibility has significantly decreased in the time since its establishment," he said.
CBO Director Keith Hall, a former George W. Bush appointee who was tapped by congressional Republican leaders to take the job in 2015, has repeatedly denied that his office has an anti-Republican bias.
The agency has roughly 235 employees. They provide "objective, impartial analysis," CBO's website states.
U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said the agency has been the target of "harsh and sometimes unjust attacks."
"Congress has a duty to review CBO's work and ask questions about economic assumptions and methodologies used, and CBO should do its best to provide Congress with explanations for that work. Democrats have certainly raised questions about CBO's assumptions in the past, and I'm sure we will in the future. However, we, Democrats and Republicans, have not been given any reason to question the integrity of CBO or its analysts," he said.
Womack has expressed appreciation for the agency, which was created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
"CBO can be a much maligned organization, and it takes a lot of arrows regarding its work," he said in an interview Wednesday.
"There will be times when members will be completely in agreement with a CBO [estimate], and there will be times when those same members will be vehemently opposed to a CBO calculation," he said.
"It's a human nature thing. We embrace the things we agree with, and we vehemently oppose the things we disagree with."
The in-depth look at the budget office is unprecedented, according to Womack.
"We have taken the analysis of CBO to a much different level this time around than it's ever been done," he added.
A Section on 03/08/2018