Will Republicans clean house at the CBO?

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.

See also: CBO lowers PPACA enrollment projections.

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.

There are certainly ways we might reform the CBO to make it even better. Conservatives are starting to suggest that CBO models should be available to the public. I also recently heard a suggestion that the CBO should include private costs as well as direct spending in its scores, in order to discourage politicians from relying so heavily on regulatory mandates as clumsy substitutes for direct spending. Both of these seem like good ideas to me, though I have not studied either of them closely enough to be sure that I understand the drawbacks.

But these changes wouldn't have kept Obamacare from being gamed. Neither would a different CBO director — or, rather, a different CBO director might have, but only if he was an ideologue who tossed out concrete standards in favor of his or her opinions. Moving to that sort of model would be a cure worse than the disease, for two reasons: First, you'd be substituting raw opinion for standards, rendering the scores basically meaningless as a policy tool; second, because Congress appoints the head of the CBO, the same Congress you're trying to stop would be the folks selecting the ideologue to render the opinions.

If we want to stop the gaming, we need to insist that politicians stop it. And, more important, we must insist that our own politicians stop it. Every policy journalist and activist whines when the other side comes up with creative kludges to lower the apparent cost of their programs. But if they clam up when their own guys are in power … well, the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.