Congress created the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as a nonpartisan advisory body, but an examination of CBO’s performance and its personnel’s political history reveals a remarkable unreliability and left-wing bias.
Democrats are using CBO analysis of the hotly debated budget reconciliation bill to fight President Donald Trump’s proposed historic tax cuts for Americans and efforts to reform programs throughout the federal government, including assuring American taxpayers are not on the hook for illegal aliens’ health care.
To bolster their arguments, Democrats and their media allies have leaned on widespread acceptance that CBO is nonpartisan — 1358 different media stories in the last year have appended the word “nonpartisan” to the beginning of the office’s name, according to the American Accountability Foundation.
But the CBO’s extensive history of overestimating benefits for Americans from public health care, underestimating costs of Democrat policies on taxpayers, and stacking the deck against Republican policies reveals a deeply partisan agency influencing lawmakers in order to further left-wing causes.
In addition to its history of unreliable projections propping up Democrats, according to FEC records, of the nearly $17,000 donated to candidates and committees from CBO employees since 1986, only $250 went to Republican candidates — a single donation to George W. Bush in 2000.
CBO’s history of overestimating benefits from public healthcare initiatives has been used by lawmakers to justify monumental policy decisions.
For example, CBO estimated 25 million people would gain coverage on Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges. But less than half that estimate actually enrolled on the exchanges, with many doing so to replace non-exchange policies they lost following the ACA’s passage.
A series of recent reports and Congressional investigations have revealed the extent of CBO’s unreliability and clear evidence of bias.
A report in January from the Economic Policy Innovation Center titled “How The Budget Baseline Is Biased” reveals the underlying bias cooked into the CBO’s books, particularly with how CBO assumes legislative proposals will influence the baseline — the benchmark for measuring budgetary effects of proposed changes in spending.
“In reality, the CBO is required by law to distort the baseline in favor of higher spending and taxes,” the blockbuster report found. It revealed “four deviations from current law in the baseline that CBO is required by statute to incorporate” to inflate spending or revenue “higher than they would actually be if Congress made no further changes in law.”
In a February hearing before a House Ways and Means Committee subcommittee, the Foundation for Government Accountability‘s Hayden Dublois testified to the CBO’s poor record of fiscal estimates.
CBO predicted President Joe Biden’s poorly named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) “would ‘result in a net decrease in the deficit of $58.1 billion’ over the 10-year budget window,’” Dublois testified. “However, CBO got it wrong. A 2024 update by the CBO reflected a new analysis that the law would in fact increase the total deficit by $300 billion over the next decade.”
In another instance of Democrat blue-tinted analysis, CBO’s predictions that the IRS would collect nearly $7.2 billion in additional revenue due to the IRA’s passage was a shocking 82 percent below projections, with actual collections of only $1.3 billion, Dublois testified.
Dublois shared additional grossly inaccurate CBO predictions related to the ACA and Medicaid.
In 2010, CBO’s predicted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion would enroll 13 million able-bodied adults across 50 states. “However, by 2019 — just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — actual expansion enrollment reached 19.5 million in the 34 states that had adopted Medicaid expansion by that time,” Dublois testified.
And during the COVID pandemic, CBO adopted a March 2020 baseline that so “dramatically underestimated Medicaid expenditures from FY2020 through FY2023” that it resulted in “a 20 percent overage in spending above CBO projections during that period.”
A 2024 report from the Foundation for Government Accountability documenting many of CBO’s “stunningly incorrect” scores found that CBO’s faulty predictions “unfortunately led members of Congress to make misinformed decisions about legislation since federal policymakers rely on the accuracy of CBO’s estimates when passing bills. In addition, CBO has also routinely misforecasted underlying assumptions relating to economic growth and budgetary trends, further compounding their mistakes.”
In addition to Medicaid expansion estimate errors, “CBO’s early estimates of [ACA] exchange enrollment were off by a factor of close to 100 percent.” CBO’s 2009 prediction that the UI portions of the ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the Obama stimulus package] would cost $39.2 billion over the 10-year budget window soon were rejected by CBO, with a revised score by CBO six years later indicating that the actual costs for the UI provisions would be $64 billion — “roughly 63 percent more than originally estimated.”
And CBO grossly underestimated food stamp spending after the stimulus package’s passage, originally estimating the changes would cost $20 billion over the ten-year budget window. But within the first five years, almost all of the predicted $20 billion in spending had been allocated. A 2019 CBO evaluation of its own estimates concluded the stimulus package “increased total spending on SNAP by $43 billion over the 10-year projection period” — more than double the amount CBO estimated in 2009.
In addition to portraying Democrat policy priorities as more politically palatable, CBO’s estimates have damaged the appeal of Republican policies.
A December 2024 report from House Ways and Means found CBO grossly underestimated the economic benefits of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The package ultimately passed with only Republican support, leading to economic growth far outpacing CBO projections.
But once Trump was out of office, CBO carried water for Biden’s signature tax cut giveaways to so-called “green” investments. The report reads:
CBO initially scored the Democrats’ Green Tax Handouts as costing $271 billion — which was crucial to allowing Democrats to use the reconciliation process to pass the law. Six months later, after the legislation became law, CBO revised their initial cost estimate to more than 2.5 times that amount to $663 billion. Numerous outside entities have scored the IRA Green Tax Handouts as costing well in excess of $1 trillion.
CBO has numerous other highly consequential inaccurate projections, including:
- In 2014, CBO estimated that Medicaid expansion under the ACA would cost $42 billion in 2015 while the actual cost was $68 billion — exceeding projections by over 60 percent.
- In 2008, as the U.S. was entering a recession, CBO predicted that real GDP would grow by 2.3 percent in 2009 — instead it contracted by 2.9 percent.
- In 2010, CBO projected that real GDP growth would average 3.2 percent from 2010 to 2016, but was only 2.1 percent – 50 percent below their prediction.
- In 2013, CBO projected that 26 million additional people would enroll in ACA exchanges by 2017, but revised this figure to 10 million in 2017 — 62 percent lower than initially predicted.
- In 2014, CBO estimated the ACA’s risk corridor program would net the federal government $8 billion over three years, assuming insurers would be profitable in selling exchange plans — however, insurers would run $2.5 billion and $5.6 billion risk corridor deficits in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
A closer look at the political activities of CBO’s personnel, particularly its Health Analysis Division, reveals a shocking left-wing bias.
A report from the American Accountability Foundation dated May 7, 2025, and obtained by Breitbart News found a staggering 84 percent of CBO’s healthcare staff — which analyzes a range of federal programs and policies that include Medicare, Medicaid, and subsidies provided through health insurance exchange — have verifiable ties to the Democrat party.
A remarkable 26 of the group’s 32 staff members are registered Democrats or have funded Democrat candidates or affiliated campaign groups. That group includes the Director, Deputy Director, and all of the unit chiefs.
It might be worse. One staffer’s partisan registration was not affiliated with a party, another voted in the 2016 Republican presidential primary in addition to voting in a Democrat primary, and four staffers’ partisan history was undetermined.
Additionally, CBO’s listed Chief Economist Mark Doms, perhaps the most influential CBO staffer, has donated $1,162.50 to Democrat candidates and committees and is a registered Democrat.
That history of missed and seemingly politically skewed projections along with personnel data casts serious doubts on CBO’s nonpartisan pledge that it “conducts objective, impartial analysis and hires employees without regard to political affiliation,” according to its website.
With Congress considering historic reforms through a budget reconciliation bill, lawmakers and voters may have good reason to ignore CBO’s analysis altogether.
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.
Read the full article here