As Democrats try to move quickly to pass President Biden’s agenda in the wake of big losses in elections this week, one procedural issue could hold them up for weeks: the Congressional Budget Office score.
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A number of centrist Democrats in the House say they want this before they vote on the $1.75 trillion plan to expand the government safety net, and Senate Democrats are procedurally required to have a score on their bill before they can vote on it.
Here’s what the CBO score is and how it could hold up legislation.
What the CBO does
The Congressional Budget Office is a nonpartisan office that estimates how much proposed and existing legislation will cost American taxpayers. Congress created the office in a law in 1974 as part of a broader effort to assert more control over the power of the purse, which is Congress’s constitutionally mandated duty.
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The office is strictly nonpartisan. It doesn’t recommend how to better spend money. It doesn’t take sides in a policy debate. It doesn’t even make any policy recommendations. Its only job is to estimate the economic impact of legislation. It does this in a couple of ways, primarily:
Scoring proposed legislation to estimate how much it will cost over a period of time. Lawmakers request this a lot, apparently. The CBO estimates that it provides thousands of informal estimates a year to various lawmakers and congressional committees. Congress also requires a CBO score for nearly every bill approved by a committee before it comes to the floor for a vote. The CBO also issues annual reports estimating the economic impact of all current laws over the next decade.
The CBO is the only official authority in Congress has on budget matters. So while lawmakers can grumble that they don’t agree with a particular CBO estimate on their legislation — and they can and often do hold up interest groups’ own economic analyses — the only one that carries any weight in Congress is the CBO’s score.
“Somebody has to be a nonpartisan, intellectually credible umpire of budget scoring,” Robert Bixby of the bipartisan budget watchdog Concord Coalition told US News in 2017. “And CBO is it. In that capacity, they’re extremely important to the process.”
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Much of its official estimates are published publicly.
How the CBO could hold up Democrats’ legislation
Democrats don’t yet have an official score on their big social spending/climate change legislation. That’s a potential political problem for Democratic leaders. In the House, at least five centrist Democrats sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) earlier this week, saying they want a CBO score on it before they vote on it.
These centrists are wary of the cost — and Republican attacks about big government spending — and they want a CBO score that they can show their constituents to explain why they voted for the package. In particular, they are hoping the CBO shows that a number of Democrats’ revenue measures, like taxing millionaires, would keep the impact on the national debt at little to nothing.
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Here’s what the centrists wrote to Pelosi in the letter, obtained by Politico: “We applaud the commitment from both you and the President that the BBB Act will be fully paid for. In order to ensure the final bill is indeed fiscally responsible, we must first have the proper CBO/JCT scoring information before any floor consideration.”
(Acronym translation: BBB is President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill, or the $1.75 trillion social safety net legislation. JCT is the Joint Committee on Taxation, another nonpartisan office in Congress that does an economic analysis similar to the CBO’s on taxes and spending.)
If these centrists withhold their votes until there’s a CBO score — or if they’re not happy with the score — they could threaten the entire legislation, since Pelosi only has three votes to spare to get it passed. The Washington Post reports that there are about five moderate holdouts as of Friday afternoon.
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It could take weeks for the CBO to produce an economic analysis. Meanwhile, Biden has urged lawmakers to move quickly on his legislation after Democrats lost the Virginia governor’s race this week.
Senate rules also require a CBO score before a vote on this legislation because Democrats are trying to pass it through a budgetary measure known as reconciliation that lets them dodge a Republican filibuster.
CBO scores have derailed legislation before
Democratic leaders stress that their bill will be paid for. “The dollar amount, as the president has said, is zero,” Pelosi has said. “This bill will be paid for.”
But what if the CBO doesn’t agree?
In 2017, Republicans had control of Washington and were trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The CBO (which also estimates the impact on health care for appropriate laws) reported that Republicans’ plan would leave 22 million additional Americans uninsured over the next decade. Headlines like that helped the Affordable Care Act to increase in popularity, and Republicans eventually failed to overturn the law.
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Then, as Republicans pushed forward with a tax-cut bill, the CBO estimated that it would increase the national deficit by $1.4 billion over the next decade. This bill did get passed into law, and that estimate proved to be prescient. The national debt grew exponentially during Donald Trump’s presidency, approaching World War II levels at 128 percent of the gross domestic product. It was driven by the tax-cut bill.
Democrats got some good early news on their proposed legislation. On Thursday, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that their proposed plan would increase revenue by about $1.5 trillion over the next decade. So even though Democrats want to spend $1.75 trillion, most of that spending would be paid for.