Warren Deschenaux is the director of the Office of Policy Analysis for the Department of Legislative Service in Annapolis. He and his staff will play a key role in analyzing the governor?s deficit-cutting tax changes.
What?s the role of you and your staff?
The leadership tends to use me to be their fiscal adviser. The staff is nonpartisan. We work for both parties. We work for individual members who ask us to do research. We work for both chambers, so the Senate and House get the same information.
What?s the hardest part of being a nonpartisan analyst?
Being prepared to make everybody mad at you.
How hard was it to craft the “doomsday” budget, balancing next year?s budget with no tax increases?
It?s never that hard to get a budget analyst to recommend a way to cut the budget. The challenge was to cut it in a way that we could imagine the legislature could at least consider doing it. That [approach] was to be as easy as possible on the programs that help people, and as hard as possible on the programs that are geared to the folks that can help themselves.
Don?t you rely a lot on administration data in your budget analysis?
We rely on the information that?s provided with the budget. But we have a staff of analysts who spend the year developing data on their own, both by talking to people and monitoring what?s going on in the agencies. The numbers are still the numbers. The budget?s either going up, or it?s going down, and there?s a story as to why. Part of the challenge for our budget analysts is to evaluate how convincing that story is.
Do you ever look back and see how accurate your estimates were?
We try to do that periodically. It?s a mixed bag.
