Senate Democrats warned Republicans not to appoint an “ideologue” to the Congressional Budget Office in a letter sent Friday, raising the political scrutiny surrounding the minutiae of the budget process.
In a letter addressed to the leaders of the incoming Republican congressional majorities and the chairmen of the budget committees, six Senate Democrats expressed worries that the GOP would use the appointment of the director of Congress’ official budget scorekeeper to pursue a partisan agenda and undercut the CBO’s credibility.
The lawmakers wrote that “appointing a partisan CBO director would threaten to erode the public’s faith in a respected institution by making it yet another tool used to rig the system against average Americans.”
Bloomberg and other outlets have reported that the GOP has decided not to reappoint current CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf when his term expires Saturday, although Republican lawmakers have not confirmed those reports.
Elmendorf is a Democratic appointee, although he is respected by many academic and think tank economists on the Right.
The Democratic authors of the letter sent Friday acknowledged that it was legitimate for Republicans to select their own expert to head the agency, but expressed fears over GOP plans to choose someone who would implement changes to the budget process favored by conservatives.
At the top of those concerns is the Republicans preference for dynamic scoring of tax cuts, which takes into account estimated economic growth as a result of the cuts and lowers the budgetary cost of lowering rates. But Democrats also sounded the alarm over the possibility that the Republican-appointed CBO director could issue a new, unfavorable estimate of the costs of Obamacare, and that he could implement an accounting methodology that would make student loans and other government credit programs appear more costly than they do by current methods.
“There is a real risk that Republicans will endanger opportunities for bipartisan cooperation by starting off with the partisan selection of a new CBO director,” the letter warned.
The letter was signed by members of the Senate’s Democratic Policy and Communication Center, including its head, Chuck Schumer of New York, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Mark Warner of Virginia. The letter was also signed by Bernie Sanders, an independent for Vermont who caucuses with Democrats and will be the minority leader on the Budget Committee, as well as by Connecticut’s Chris Murphy.
Republicans have said that current budgetary estimates of tax changes are inaccurate because they fail to capture the macroeconomic effects of rate reductions. The proposed rules for the 114th Congress include establishing a dynamic scoring analysis as the standard for many kinds of legislation. Although budgetary estimates for changes to tax law are prepared by the Joint Committee on Taxation, not the CBO, the CBO director would have a role in determining how dynamic analysis would be used in preparing projections of the budget and economy.
