All the talk this year about the lack of progress on virtually all major federal budget issues ignores the answer we did receive to one key question asked when the fiscal 2000 debate began: Would the Congressional Budget Office be impartial and bipartisan under new director Dan Crippen?
We now know that the answer is a definitive, unambiguous, and unequivocal yes.
The issue was raised because of Crippen's background. Although there was never any doubt about his intellectual or analytical capabilities, at the time of his appointment he was considered to be far more political and partisan than any of the previous CBO directors. When he accepted the job, doubt was raised about whether Crippen would make CBO into something that some members of the Republican leadership had been seeking for some time: an organization that sees its mission as supporting the majority.
By the end of this year it had become clear that Crippen was guarding CBO's independence as jealously as each of his predecessors had done. It was also clear that it was no accident.
In spite of what at times was intense pressure to revise them, CBO's numbers frequently angered the majority this year. They were said to be too timid, based on too conservative an economic forecast, or were just plain too high and so CBO's estimated surplus was too low. These estimates made it difficult for some of the Republican policy preferences to make it through the budget process.
As a result, to an unprecedented extent CBO this year was ordered by Congress to change its scoring to match the more optimistic numbers being produced by the Clinton administration.
Although CBO complied, it did so grudgingly; Crippen's crew made it clear that the congressionally mandated scoring did not represent their views of the budget future. In its year-end report, for example, CBO stated both what it had been told to do and what it thought would happen if its preferred estimates were used.
And it did not bury this highly politically charged comparison in a hard-to-read table. The language in the report made it very clear that, contrary to what congressional Republicans were saying, under CBO scoring the primary Republican budget goal of having a budget surplus that was at least as large as the surplus in the Social Security trust fund was not achieved. This required the leadership to answer a number of politically embarrassing questions at the exact time they were hoping to take a political victory lap because of their budget accomplishments.
A further example of the Crippen-era independence is something that is still in the works. CBO is currently considering using a different primary baseline next year, one that will not assume that the appropriations caps will be the limit on spending. If this happens, CBO will assume that discretionary spending will be higher than the caps and, therefore, that the non-Social Security surplus will be lower than would otherwise be the case. This baseline would provide less for either a tax cut or spending increase and would again thwart what now appears to be the congressional budget plans.
This is not to say that CBO or Crippen have become the darlings of House and Senate Democrats. To the contrary, on several occasions Crippen's testimony has so angered the Democratic leadership that they have re-raised the question of his impartiality.
But the best example of where Crippen is really coming from is that the people he has hired are true budgeteers who have spent their careers devoted to good budgeting and solid numbers.
Still, all is not well at CBO; the organization still faces a number of important challenges that could have a big impact on its future. For example, Congress' decision to rely increasingly on Office of Management and Budget numbers this past year rather than those provided by its own budget office has the potential to marginalize CBO somewhat during the fiscal 2001 debate. And now that Congress has learned how to use directed scorekeeping to pick and choose the estimates it likes, is there any doubt that this will continue in the future?
Challenges like these are not new for CBO. In fact, they are similar to those CBO has faced almost every year since being created in 1974. But given what happened this year, these problems can now be addressed without the additional burden of having to prove that the director is not serving anyone's political agenda.
Black Ink Award: One More Day To Vote
Votes will be accepted only until Dec. 15 for this year's winner of the Black Ink Award, which is given to the person or organization that "Budget Battles" readers say has made the most positive contribution to this year's federal budget debate. So if you have not yet made your choice, do it NOW by clicking here. In alphabetical order the five nominees selected by the readers are Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.; the Congressional Budget Office; Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan; House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill; and Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn. The winner will be announced next week in the final "Budget Battles" of 1999.
Question Of The Week
Last Week's Question. Budget Battles readers made last week's question the toughest ever to judge because there were so many unusual responses. Some were scholarly, some were tongue-in-cheek, and some were just plain funny. There was a three-way tie so, in the holiday spirit, "I Won A Budget Battle" T-shirts are going to three winners this week, all of who suggested that the invention of the printing press was the single most important budget event of the millennium. Why? Because without it there would be no paper currency and budgets would have to be handwritten. The winners are Thom Rochford of the Department of Veterans Affairs; Robert Shirk, who works at Tinker Air Force Base; and Evan Glass of CNN.
Honorable mention also to Doug Hamilton and Ralph Smith of the Congressional Budget Office for the separate suggestions of double-entry bookkeeping in the 15th century; and David Kensinger of GOPAC for his suggestion of the Louisiana Purchase.
This Week's Question. Rudolph, Blitzen and ... ? What is the name of the reindeer who should lead Santa's federal budget sleigh this year? Send your response to scollender@njdc.com by the close of business on Friday, Dec. 17, and you could win an "I Won A Budget Battle" T-shirt. Note: So that you can have it to wear Christmas morning, the winner will receive her or his T-shirt by overnight delivery. So make sure your address and telephone number are included with your entry!
Correction. The affiliation of one of the winners from the week of Nov. 30 was incorrectly stated. Reid Edwards works at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory rather than the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. My apologies for what I understand is the equivalent of confusing The University of Michigan with Michigan State.