The Congressional Budget Office's math doesn't add up. The agency normally gets to decide which bills reduce the deficit, meaning they can pass the Senate with a bare majority and avoid a filibuster.
That could change this year or next. Senate Republicans got a competing analysis of their health care bill from the Department of Health and Human Services. If that happens, the CBO will be weakened like never before, and face a fight for its own relevance and survival.
Twice in March , it projected that the House health care bill would reduce insurance coverage by 24 million people , and increase premiums in the first few years. The day after the second report, House Speaker Paul Ryan threw in the towel on repeal , for the time being. Then on May 24, after Ryan jammed through an updated health bill without a score, the CBO released its analysis, confirming that the law would reduce coverage by 23 million , increase premiums in before they started to fall again, and increase premiums for older Americans by as much as percent.
On June 26, the CBO took up the Senate's version of the bill and concluded that it, too, would reduce coverage by 23 million. The CBO has already scored that proposal , and found that it would reduce coverage by 32 million and double premiums over 10 years. All these numbers got substantial press coverage and heavily affected congressional debates over the legislation.
Susan Collins R-ME tweeted. That made the CBO an easy target. If the numbers were wrong, then the entire critique — that the bill would strips millions of their health insurance and make those who still had coverage pay more in premiums and deductibles — was invalid. The CBO was off on Obamacare, but it was fairly close; it estimated that 7 million people would be enrolled in the Obamacare marketplaces and getting subsidies in , while in reality 5 million people were. Avik Roy, a conservative health policy analyst and booster of the Senate health bill, argued that the CBO vastly overestimated the power of Obamacare's individual mandate and the coverage loss that its repeal would cause.
The American Enterprise Institute's Joel Zinberg argued that the CBO coverage loss projections were premised on more people gaining coverage through Medicaid expansion and the health exchanges in the next few years than realistically will; he notes that the CBO assumes some new states will adopt the Medicaid expansion , and disputes that such a shift is likely.
It would, instead, boost growth from 1. But Republicans have good reason to fear a bad CBO score for their next priority: tax reform. And at every point in this process, the CBO will be a crucial actor with the ability to derail a bill entirely.
These are really costly changes. Most Republicans also want to adopt "full expensing," a corporate tax reform that lets companies deduct the entire cost of their investments immediately, instead of spreading the deduction over several years. Under the budget reconciliation process Republicans will use to avoid a filibuster, one of the few binding constraints was that the law must reduce the deficit after a year window.
They could make the cuts expire after 10 years, as with the Bush tax cuts, or they could find pay-fors to cover the cost. And every indication from congressional Republicans is that they want permanent tax cuts.
Republicans have ideas for how to cover the cost. One of the biggest is the hugely controversial border adjustment measure , which Walmart, the Koch brothers, and other influential business lobbies are loudly opposing. Another is ending the deductibility of interest for debt, a very worthwhile proposal that is sure to enrage banks that take out massive amounts of debt; Goldman Sachs veteran turned Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has said he opposes this shift.
And even if all of those controversial changes made it through, they still might not be enough to pay for all the cuts that Republicans want.
So tax reform will be a delicate balancing act. Republicans will need to determine exactly which cuts they need, which they can reconcile themselves to abandoning, and which pay-fors they hate the least. The CBO will be the final arbiter of how much each provision costs, on both the tax cut and tax hike sides.
It will be the entity that decides if the overall bill raises or lowers deficits in the out years, and thus whether or not it can pass the Senate with 51 votes. It can indirectly boost certain pay-fors by estimating them as raising lots of revenue, or kill them by minimizing their revenue impact.
If the CBO scored border adjustment accordingly as not raising revenue after 10 years, that would effectively kill its chances of being included in a reform package. But that will not keep the CBO from becoming a target if Republicans view it as an impediment to a tax reform deal. The Central Business Office CBO is a centralized processing unit which organizes and manages financial and administrative operations for various departments as well as select Faculty Startup accounts. We offer free services that give departments across campus the option to centralize their business functions.
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