Congressional Budget Office

3 Key excerpts on "Congressional Budget Office"

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  eBook - PDF

  The Federal Budget

  Politics, Policy, Process

  • Allen Schick(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  But it is in the president’s 64 THE FEDERAL BUDGET ▼ BOX 4-1 CBO Independence: Challenge and Defense C BO’s role in developing baseline projections and scoring the budgetary impact of legislation some-times places it into conflict with members of Congress. Members often try to influence CBO’s esti-mates behind the scenes, but it is rare that disputes break out into the open. However, in 1998, as this exchange of letters indicates, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and CBO Director June O’Neill clashed on the accuracy of CBO’s revenue projections. At stake were Republican claims that a projec-tion of higher revenues (and therefore a bigger surplus) would strengthen their case for tax cuts. Although CBO had increased its original revenue projection for fiscal year 1999 by $72 billion, the Republican leadership argued that this estimate should have been raised by a greater amount. The first salvo was fired by House Republican leaders in a letter to Representative James Walsh (R-N.Y.), who chaired the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee. Implied in this was the threat that if CBO was not more accommodating in revenue estimates, its appropriations would be cut: “We are deeply concerned about the increasing evidence that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is utterly unable to predict consistent and accurate future revenues or even the fiscal implications of changes in budget policy. Because of these failures, I urge you to direct the CBO to address these shortcomings immediately. While forecasting is an inexact science and there is some logic to being cautious, the CBO’s low estimates have been consistently wrong—and wrong by a country mile. Currently, the CBO is estimating that real GDP growth will be a slow 2.1 percent over the long-term. Yet over the past 16 years the average GDP growth has been 3.0 percent, in line with the entire post World War II period.

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  Public Policy in an Uncertain World

  Analysis and Decisions

  • Charles F. Manski(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  . . . Conventional wisdom is not nec-essarily true. I shall similarly use the term conventional certitude to describe predictions that are generally accepted as true, but that are not necessarily true. CBO Scoring of Pending Legislation In the United States today, conventional certitude is exemplified by Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scoring of pending federal legisla-tion. I will use CBO scoring as an extended case study. The CBO was established in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Section 402 states (Committee on the Budget, U.S. House of Represen-tatives, 2008, 39– 40): The Director of the Congressional Budget Office shall, to the extent practicable, prepare for each bill or resolution of a public character re-ported by any committee of the House of Representatives or the Senate (except the Committee on Appropriations of each House), and submit to such committee—(1) an estimate of the costs which would be in-curred in carrying out such bill or resolution in the fiscal year in which it is to become effective and in each of the 4 fiscal years following such fiscal year, together with the basis for each such estimate; This language has been interpreted as mandating the CBO to provide point predictions (scores) of the budgetary impact of pending legisla-tion. Whereas the 1974 legislation called for prediction five years into the future, the more recent practice has been to forecast ten years out. CBO scores are conveyed in letters that the director writes to leaders of Congress and chairs of congressional committees. They are not accom-panied by measures of uncertainty, even though legislation often pro- Policy Analysis with Incredible Certitude 17 poses complex changes to federal law, whose budgetary implications must be difficult to foresee. Serious policy analysts recognize that scores for complex legisla-tion are fragile numbers, derived from numerous untenable assump-tions.

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  Bounded Bureaucracy and the Budgetary Process in the United States

  • Jay Ryu(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Republicans somehow believed that CBO’s neutrality might be very useful in demanding the president’s proposal for a balanced budget by 2002 pass CBO’s scoring hurdle. Republicans opted for CBO’s more neutral and technically accurate scoring reports rather than the president’s politically biased OMB estimation (Rubin 2003, 101). The institutional power struggle between the president and Congress, therefore, allowed a substantial leeway on the part of the CBO in maintaining neutral competence. It also enabled the CBO to remain an effective information processor in Congress, especially under split branch governments. Overall, political tensions that might have thrown the CBO into political mire ironically allowed a safeguard against the political crossfire (Rubin 2003, 107–9). In addition to such political conditions that rendered the CBO able to maintain its neutral competence, the CBO itself has also kept efforts to maintain its reputation as a politically neutral information processor. As Rubin (2003, 109) notes, while the CBO was subjected to substantial pressure for dynamic scoring that was not technically acceptable, the pressure was somewhat under control. Overall, where the OMB has been dedicated to serving political and policy preferences of the president, the CBO has fundamentally been trying to serve two parties in Congress. Partisan configurations between the president and Congress, as well as partisan conditions within Congress, are thus highly likely to define the peculiar features of the Congressional budget process. Whether and how bureaucratic centralization in Congress, CBO’s creation, affects the information-processing capacity of budget decision makers will substantially hinge on such partisan configurations. There is one final caveat over the impact of the CBO on Congressional budget choices. As discussed in Chapter 4, the OMB was expected to function as an information processor and a friction reducer

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