The supposedly “nonpartisan” Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which provides Congress with cost estimates for its policy proposals, may not be the neutral arbiter it claims to be, a new report suggests.
The CBO was established in 1974 to “provide objective, nonpartisan information to support the Congressional budget process and to help the Congress make effective budget and economic policy.” However, a new report from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) — a right-of-center public policy think tank — found that the CBO is overwhelmingly staffed by Democrats, and that the agency has a history of scoring errors that benefit Democrats’ proposals.
Of the 84% of CBO employees the FGA was able to match with voter registration records, 78.9% of them were Democrats, while only 12.5% were Republicans and 8.6% were independent or unaffiliated. The disparity is even more pronounced in certain departments, such as the Health Division, which produces estimates for major programs like Medicare and Medicaid, where more than 93% of the staff are Democrats, FGA found. (RELATED: How A ‘Nonpartisan’ Government Budget Office May Be Misleading Lawmakers On Spending As GOP Megabill Looms Large)
Even among those registered as “independents,” donation records show political contributions to Democrats, suggesting that the true percentage of liberal employees in the agency may be even higher, according to the FGA report.
“The CBO loves to say they’re just doing math — but when that math is built on partisan bias and bad assumptions, it becomes political storytelling rather than hard science,” Hayden Dublois, data and analytics director at the FGA, and a co-author of the report, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The report attributed the ideological skew in part to a “revolving-door-like relationship with both liberal members of Congress and left-leaning think tanks, where CBO’s analysts often gain their political experience before scoring the most important piece of legislation.”
The report’s findings follow heightened scrutiny of the CBO’s projections for the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, aimed at advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda via the budget reconciliation process. On Wednesday, the CBO estimated that the bill could increase the federal deficit by $2.4 trillion and leave almost 11 million uninsured due to Medicaid changes.
The Trump administration disputes the underlying assumptions of the CBO’s projections and has argued that the bill would reduce the deficit by $1.4 trillion.
The FGA report argues that Congress should not trust the CBO’s projections, citing what it calls a “disastrous track record,” especially when it comes to forecasting the effects of Medicaid reforms. For example, the CBO predicted in 2017 that repealing ObamaCare’s individual mandate would result in 13 million newly uninsured Americans, but this projection never materialized, according to the FGA.
“CBO makes scary claims about how many people will lose Medicaid, but they leave out the truth: The vast majority of those counted are either enrolled in multiple states, already ineligible, have other health coverage, are illegal aliens, are able-bodied adults who can work but choose not to, or aren’t even enrolled in the program,” Dublois said regarding the current reconciliation bill.
“Here’s the bottom line: CBO is biased, and its numbers consistently miss the mark by embarrassing margins,” said Dublois. “Congress should be able to rely on its service agency to produce quality data. Instead, CBO has become another captive institution wrapped in non-partisan clothing.”
In recent weeks, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have ramped up their criticism of the CBO.
“There hasn’t been a single staffer in the entire Congressional Budget Office that has contributed to a Republican since the year 2000. But guess what? There have been many staffers within the Congressional Budget Office who have contributed to Democrat candidates and politicians every single cycle,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday. “So unfortunately, this is another institution in our country that has become partisan and political.”
The CBO did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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