Support the CBO Show Your Work Act, S. 1746

On behalf of our activist community, I urge you to contact your senators and ask them to support the CBO Show Your Work Act, S. 1746, introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). The bill would require the Congressional Budget Office to make its models and data available to Congress and the public.

Created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provides members and staff of the House and Senate with fiscal and economic analyses of legislation and budget forecasts. The CBO, however, is not currently required to show the models and data on which it makes its assumptions.

While the CBO is an independent, nonpartisan agency, the agency has been criticized for providing inaccurate analyses and forecasts to Congress, including economic projections that failed to predict a major recession and wildly inaccurate assumptions about the impact of the Affordable Care Act. More recently, the CBO provided coverage estimates on health insurance reform legislation based on a baseline that was not grounded in reality.

The CBO Show Your Work Act would require the CBO to make the models and data employed to produce its analyses and cost estimates, as well as any details that were used, available to Congress and on the agency’s website. This much-needed transparency will allow interested parties outside of Congress to hold the CBO accountable.

Analyses and estimates produced by the CBO have a tremendous impact on public policy debates inside the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is important that the models and data used to come to the conclusions that the CBO reaches are open to the public. For these reasons, I urge you to contact your senators and ask them to support the CBO Show Your Work Act, S. 1746.

Sincerely,

Adam Brandon, President, FreedomWorks