Breaking the CBO

By tradition, the House and Senate budget committee chairs alternate between who gets to pick the Director of the Congressional Budget Office. So it was John Spratt who picked Doug Elmendorf, and as his term expires it should be Kent Conrad's job to pick the next guy, and Conrad wants to keep Elmendorf in place. But in formal terms, the choice requires the concurrence of the leaders in both the House and the Senate, so John Boehner has the authority to break with tradition and block Elmendorf's reappointment.

John Maggs reports that Boehner is inclined to do just that because he's "still angry about Elmendorf's role in health care."

This seems to me like an example of a guy who doesn't know how good he's got it. When the job came open, there was no check on the Democrats' ability to appoint whoever they wanted. They could have put in a strong partisan or a big-time liberal, someone who would produce CBO scores showing that clean energy legislation would boost growth or health care would generate ponies for everyone. Instead because neither Spratt nor Conrad is very liberal, they hit upon a not-very-liberal CBO Director choice. Consequently, under the leadership of the not-very-liberal Doug Elmendorf the CBO has consistently angered environmentalists by overstating the costs of action and understating the costs of inaction. The CBO also spent the entire health reform debate angering reformers by assuming no efficiency improvements due to better incentives.

Consequently, Elmendorf's "role" in the health reform debate was to make a fair amount of trouble for Democrats. And in turn, for a brief shining moment Elmendorf and the Congressional Budget Office became the American right's best friends. Op-eds, floor speeches, TV hits, radio spots, etc. were full of high praise for the CBO. Sing, sing, sing the praises of Elmendorf and his budget scorekeepers. Elmendorf had "proved" that the Orszag/Cutler ideas about bending the curve were false. He's laid-bare the fallacy of the whole effort. Senator Chuck Grassley even analogized the CBO to God.

What happened then was CBO analysis in hand, congressional leaders worked to change the bill to bring it in line with the CBO's ideas of what measures would reduce the growth rate in costs and produce deficit reductions. Suddenly conservatives stopped believing in the CBO. And now Boehner appears to have cooked up an alternate version of history in which "the White House leaned on Elmendorf and that Elmendorf caved" when what in fact happened was that Elmendorf gave the bill so-so marks and the congressional leaders caved and changed the bill.

At any rate, the "rotating" system is a good idea because under the rotating system there's always someone in a position to make a choice. If we shift to the Boehner system where the House and Senate leaders need to agree, then in the contemporary environment of polarized parties, the CBO leadership will be caught in a tug-o-war whenever there's a partisan mismatch. This will sharply reduce the prestige of the CBO and likely result, at the margin, in a lower technical quality of legislation further driving the US Congress toward being a national joke.