A recent report has suggested that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which is tasked with providing Congress with cost estimates for proposed policies, may not be as neutral as previously believed.
Established in 1974, the objective of the CBO was to “provide objective, nonpartisan information to support the Congressional budget process and to help the Congress make effective budget and economic policy.”
According to a new report from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a right-leaning public policy think tank, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is staffed primarily by individuals affiliated with the Democratic Party. Compounding concerns, the report highlights the CBO’s longstanding track record of scoring errors that tend to favor Democratic policy proposals.
According to The Daily Caller, even among staffers who identified as independents, donation records reveal substantial contributions to Democratic candidates. This suggests that the true proportion of liberal-leaning employees at the agency is likely higher than the initial findings of the report indicate.
“The CBO loves to say they’re just doing math — but when that math is built on partisan bias and bad assumptions, it becomes political storytelling rather than hard science,” Hayden Dublois, data and analytics director at the FGA, and a co-author of the report, went on to say during an interview with the Daily Caller.
The FGA report explained that the reason for the ideological skew was a “revolving-door-like relationship with both liberal members of Congress and left-leaning think tanks, where CBO’s analysts often gain their political experience before scoring the most important piece of legislation.”
“The report’s findings follow heightened scrutiny of the CBO’s projections for the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, aimed at advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda via the budget reconciliation process. On Wednesday, the CBO estimated that the bill could increase the federal deficit by $2.4 trillion and leave almost 11 million uninsured due to Medicaid changes,” the Daily Caller said.
Despite that projection, however, Russ Vought, the director of President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, called out the CBO’s bias and said that the bill will actually reduce the deficit by $1.4 trillion.
“OMB just reviewed the new CBO score of the One Big Beautiful bill. It confirms what we knew about the bill at House passage. The bill REDUCES deficits by $1.4 trillion over ten years when you adjust for CBO’s one big gimmick–not using a realistic current policy baseline. It includes $1.7 trillion in mandatory savings, the most in history. If you care about deficits and debt, this bill dramatically improves the fiscal picture,” he posted on X.