A few weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office bumped up its federal budget deficit projections for 2024 by $400 billion.
The CBO is non-partisan and provides widely-respected analyses of proposed legislation, known as the CBO “score,” which Congress uses to make decisions. That is the CBO’s job — it’s been doing it for 50 years.
But this year, a group of economists have started an organization housed at Yale to experiment with new ways of scoring proposed legislation.
“When the Congressional Budget Office scores a piece of legislation for lawmakers, they really tend to focus on the cost of the proposal,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director of the newly formed Yale Budget Lab. “We are trying to bring outcomes more into the conversation.”
To understand how that works, think about something like the Child Tax Credit. That costs the government money, “but also it does impact children’s development,” said Gimbel. “That is something that policymakers might care about, but that might not, at least immediately be reflected in economic statistics.”
Twenty-five years from now, the children impacted by the child tax credit could be workers. And which tax credits their families received, how much food and support those kids got at home, could influence their future earnings for decades. But that’s not necessarily something the CBO would calculate.
“For most cost estimates, the information we provide is at the 10-year horizon,” said Phillip Swagel, director of the CBO.
“We have a particular mandate and a particular mission to provide budgetary information to the Congress,” he said. “These other organizations, including the Yale Budget Lab, can take a broader perspective and I think that’s great and a useful complement to what we do.”
Notice he said complement not substitute. Gimbel said she and her colleagues are by no means trying to undermine the CBO’s work. The Budget Lab is also not the first new entrant into the bill-scoring game. A handful of other think tanks and research organizations, including the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Tax Policy Center, and the American Enterprise Institute, produce cost estimates of proposed legislation as well.
But The Budget Lab is particularly focused on long-term, societal outcomes. “We’re partly just trying to pull together a proof of concept for expansion of what budget scoring could look like,” said Gimbel.
The CBO has to follow specific rules set by Congress, while outside organizations like The Budget Lab have more freedom to experiment.
“The CBO is often described as the referee,” said Harvard Kennedy School’s Doug Elmendorf, who ran the CBO from 2009 to 2015. “It is not trying to have either team win, not trying to achieve any particular policy outcome. It’s just calling the balls and strikes.”
But rules can change. “Until a video review came along, a referee could not say, ‘Let’s just stop, I wanted to go over and take a look at what the cameras show me.’ That was just out of bounds,” he said.
Economists are always coming up with new tools for analyzing proposed laws. “And not every possible change in what CBO does would be a good idea, but it’s worth experimenting,” said Elmendorf. “And I think these outside organizations can help to do that.”
In that sense, you could think of the Yale Budget Lab as a sports analyst, providing information to Congress and the public that goes beyond the official scoreboard.
