Posted by Phil Joyce[1]
Arguments in government occur as often over assumptions as they do over priorities. At a time when partisanship in the US seems at an all-time high, institutions that produce credible facts are particularly valuable. In this context, I have spent a lot of time thinking about a particularly influential and important national government institution—the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), an agency that is now 36 years old. Just last month, Georgetown University Press published my book on CBO, which is the first ever institutional history of this agency (The Congressional Budget Office: Honest Numbers, Power, and Policymaking).
CBO’s importance in US national debates, obvious to many observers for a long time, became apparent once again during the debates on the Obama health reform bill in 2009 and 2010. The President, who had insisted that any bill could “not add one dime to the deficit,” put CBO, as the official Congressional cost estimator, in the position of heavily influencing the content of the eventual health reform legislation. This was not the first time that CBO had been in such a position. History is chock full of instances where key initiatives of a majority party—the Carter energy policy in the 1970s, the Reagan program of the 1980s, the Clinton health reform of the 1990s—were called into question by CBO. It is nothing short of amazing that the United States Congress—as partisan an institution as it is possible to imagine—actually tolerates (and in fact, supports) such and inconvenient nonpartisan institution staffed by its own employees.
