How A ‘Nonpartisan’ Government Budget Office May Be Misleading Lawmakers On Spending As GOP Megabill Looms Large

The agency providing Congress with cost estimates — including projections for the GOP’s major reconciliation bill — has a long history of inaccuracy and bias, according to some policy experts and lawmakers.

Established in 1975, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was created to “provide objective, nonpartisan information to support the Congressional budget process and to help the Congress make effective budget and economic policy.” While it plays a key role in shaping legislative debates, including on the GOP’s sweeping reconciliation package designed to advance Trump’s agenda, some CBO critics argue that its projections often fall short of the office’s mission.

Each year, the CBO produces roughly 600 to 800 cost estimates, including for major legislation such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the current GOP reconciliation bill. The agency’s most recent estimate projected that the Republican proposal would add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over a decade. However, the agency’s track record includes several high-profile estimates that have been significantly off-base, viewed by some as honest miscalculations and by others as purposeful distortions.

For instance, the CBO initially estimated that President Joe Biden’s signature IRA would reduce the deficit by approximately $58.1 billion between 2022 and 2031. However, its 2024 outlook revised that estimate to a $428 billion increase in the cumulative deficit, $224 billion of which they attributed to adjusted projections of the IRA’s electric vehicle tax credits and revenues from gas taxes.

The CBO declined to comment in response to a DCNF inquiry.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and again that the CBO scores Democrats’ spending priorities favorably and Republicans’ tax relief unfavorably,” Republican Rep. Ron Estes of Kansas told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “CBO falsely claimed that Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would reduce tax receipts for the Treasury. In reality, TCJA exceeded CBO’s predictions for tax receipts by more than $1 trillion while growing the economy for everyday Americans.”

Estes and other critics say the core problem is the lack of transparency into CBO’s data and methods. Notably, the CBO will eventually weigh in to score the Senate version of the GOP’s reconciliation bill, the House version of which passed by a tight party-line vote on Thursday.

“They seem to issue press statements designed to influence the news cycle without sharing the data,” Republican Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As we are debating reconciliation, for example, they don’t share annual cash flow projections of bringing down the deficit by year. We need that data to make decisions.”

Davidson, along with other Republican legislators, has introduced various proposals they say will help address the problem. One such bill, the CBO Show Your Work Act, would require the agency to make its models, underlying assumptions and data preparation routines available to Congress.

“The CBO is wrong more often than right. We must install common-sense guardrails, ensuring that reports are accurate and free from left-leaning political bias,” Republican Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia told the DCNF. Carter co-sponsored the HEALTH Panel Act with Estes, which Carter argues will improve the accuracy of the CBO’s scoring of healthcare-related measures.

The agency purports to hire people “on the basis of their expertise and without regard to political affiliation.” However, the Health Analysis Division, which produces estimates for major programs like Medicare and Medicaid, is staffed overwhelmingly by Democrats, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) recently found.

“The real problem is the pervasive groupthink that comes from allowing our institutions to hire left-wing leaders to recruit analysts almost exclusively from left-wing universities,” AAF President Tom Jones said in a statement to the DCNF. “This practice has created a monster in our government, where institutions like the CBO operate as echo chambers for progressive academics.”

Others note the inherent difficulty in modeling complex legislative proposals.

“CBO has the difficult task of not only estimating costs of these provisions and the direct revenue implications, but also how all those things in a blender affect economic growth and how that economic growth affects revenue collections,” Hayden Dublois, data and analytics director at the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), told the DCNF.

Dublois, who recently testified before Congress about the CBO’s poor track record, pointed to recent efforts to improve transparency — including a meeting between the CBO, lawmakers, and organizations like the FGA — as a positive step in the right direction.

“I’m hopeful that they’re taking feedback into account,” Dublois said. “Transparency and accountability should be a nonpartisan priority.”

Other projections of the GOP reconciliation package have varied drastically from the CBO estimates. Trump administration officials have suggested that the bill would not add to the deficit, but instead end up saving $1.6 trillion. Others, such as the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, have estimated greater increases to the deficit at $3.8 trillion and $3.3 trillion, respectively.