Do Republicans need to clean house at the CBO?

The problem with the CBO is that any such project requires certain procedural conventions. For example, it forecasts over a set period in order to make choices easily comparable and to reduce the uncertainty in its predictions. (The longer your model runs, the more the unforeseen circumstances pile up.) It forecasts based on current law, because otherwise the model would be defined by an analyst’s intuition about the future course of elections and legislation. It uses models that generate fairly predictable responses to various inputs. And so forth.

These predictable conventions are an excellent idea. Without them, CBO forecasts would be mercurial reports subject to heavy bias toward the policy preferences of the analysts. I know that Republicans think the CBO was giving Democrats a helping hand in gaming the system, but if anything, the opposite was the case — Elmendorf went out of his way to emphasize the uncertainties that underlay the headline numbers. If I thought that there had been anything less than honorable about the office’s conduct, you can bet I would have said so; I wasn’t exactly shy about criticizing Obamacare during its passage. But I came away from every report and interaction impressed with the integrity, humility and hard work of the CBO.

So how, then, did the scores get gamed? As I suggested in my last post, predictable conventions are necessary — that’s why we have accounting standards, not reports from accountants that say “This company looks pretty good to me!” But the problem with predictable conventions is that you can game them. Companies do it with accounting, salespeople do it with commission calculations, and politicians do it with their budget people. We can certainly try to reduce this behavior — for example, by screaming loud and long when it happens. But the problem is usually not with the standards, nor with the auditors. It’s with the folks trying to comply with the letter of the rules while flagrantly violating the spirit.