A new front has opened in Republican’s war on the Congressional Budget Office—the non-partisan agency currently run by a conservative Republican appointee that crunches the numbers on major legislation like the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
In a speech at the National Press Club on Monday, Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) announced that another member of the hardline conservative group will attempt to shoehorn an amendment into the current federal budget negotiation that would strip the Congressional Budget Office of 15 million dollars in funding and 89 of its staff members.
“For the first time in 35-plus years, there will be a rule that will be used this week called the Holman Rule,” Meadows said. “It gives us the tool to actually go in and cut the funding without cutting an entire agency.”
Meadows justified pushing for these cuts by repeating the increasingly common and incorrect Republican line of attack that the CBO is unreliable—a drumbeat that has grown so loud that every single past CBO director, Republican and Democratic, recently wrote an open letter to Congress pleading with them to cut it out.
“They’re the one group that makes a weatherman’s 10-day forecast look accurate,” quipped Meadows on Monday. “We believe we needed to address it.”
Meadows plan to “address” the CBO’s inaccuracy would be to bar them from conducting any independent analyses whatsoever. Instead, he suggested, they should simply mix together the studies of various partisan and corporate-funded think tanks.
“They ought to be aggregators,” he said. “We ought to take a score from Heritage, from AEI, from Brookings, from the Urban Institute and bring them together for a composite score that would represent a wide swath of their abilities. We think that’s a pragmatic way to rely on the private sector and let Congress rely on a score that’s accurate.”
Meadows boasted Monday that the Holman rule has not been used for decades, but the Freedom Caucus was dedicated to bringing it back. In fact, the Caucus pushed the House to vote earlier this year to officially reinstate it. Among other provisions, the rule allows Congress to target specific federal employees and cut their salaries, raising fears it could be used for partisan retaliation.
Of course. We didn’t like the numbers they were producing based on nonpartisan basis and… well… math… so let’s gut the CBO.
When the facts don’t fit your narrative, just change the facts, that’s how the GOP operates.
Won’t defunding the CBO interfere with the work of rewriting every CBO report to show that Republicans were right all along?
That makes no sense at all. The sources from partisan groups have worse track records. It seems an independent analysis is the best thing that can be done.
Conservatives really have lost their minds. I am sure there are some articles cherry picking about how wrong CBO has been etc. Meanwhile giving nothing to compare it to or consideration to methods and the like. Just throw the baby out with the bath water.
There used to be a Congressional advisory board for technology and science that kept members in the loop on science and the like. Newt cut that out in the 90’s for much the same reason that these clowns are talking about. They got in the way of our ideology.
How long until we can consider this administration a tyranny?
Asking for a friend…