At RealClearPolicy Andrew Wilform complains that the Congressional Budget Office is doing its job:
It is true that CBO and JCT have been guilty of using flawed assumptions in the past, as NTUF has pointed out. But the current system is such that they are effectively required to do so by Congress. Moderate reform can improve their ability to inform legislators and taxpayers about the impacts of legislation while encouraging the use of more realistic analysis.
As a first step, NTUF has created the Taxpayers Budget Office as a way of holding both the CBO and Congress accountable. The Taxpayers Budget Office aims to serve as a watchdog to provide more critical analysis at times when CBO does not provide the full picture. But lawmakers should also do their part by attempting to reform CBO to improve its methodology and make it more difficult for legislators to manipulate CBO processes.
The CBO is a creature of Congress and does its bidding. If the Congress tells CBO that such and such a provision will sunset, they’ve got to assume it will.
He longs for any agency that has never existed and cannot.
The real way to hold Congress accountable is for
- Bills to be limited to a single subject matter.
- Spending bills to include specific, explicit sources for what they’re spending, e.g. borrowing, a special tax, etc.
- Ditto for tax expenditures.
That can be accomplished the easy way, by Congress imposing rules on itself, or the hard way, by constitutional amendment. Neither will happen. The Congress has always been irresponsible and is now largely unaccountable and will remain so.
There’s also the Congressional Research Service, which still does not publish it’s research – again thanks to Congress.
We have lots of problems in all 3 branches of government, bu even with Trump sitting in the Exec branch, I still think our biggest problems lie with Congress. If Congress came even just a little bit close to doing the things it should do, most of our federal governmental problems are fixed or at least bearable.
Steve