# Congressional Budget Office The **Congressional Budget Office (CBO)** is the nonpartisan agency that gives Congress independent budget and economic analysis — most consequentially, the official **"scores"** estimating what proposed legislation will cost and how it will affect the deficit, the economy, and (for health bills) coverage. Created by the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act — the same law that constrained presidential impoundment — the CBO exists so that Congress is not dependent on the executive branch's OMB (the [[Executive Office of the President Hub]]) for the numbers it needs to legislate. Its director is appointed by Congress; the agency is rigorously nonpartisan by design and reputation. For the KB, the CBO is the **factual referee of the [[Power of the Purse]]** — and therefore a target whenever its numbers are inconvenient. When a CBO score shows that a favored bill explodes the deficit or strips health coverage from millions, the response has increasingly been to attack the scorekeeper rather than the score. ## Under attack (2025–2026) The CBO's scoring of the second term's signature budget legislation made it a political target. Trump called the agency "very hostile"; Speaker [[Mike Johnson]] called it "notorious for getting it wrong"; Majority Leader [[Steve Scalise]] said it kept "making the same mistakes." Director **Phillip Swagel** publicly pushed back, calling the attacks "misleading," noting that the criticism "has been picked up so widely," and observing that it is "strange to be criticized for following the law." The episode is a clean example of a recurring authoritarian pattern: when an independent, fact-producing institution returns unwelcome findings, the institution's legitimacy is attacked rather than the facts engaged. It parallels the pressure on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (jobs and inflation data) and the [[Government Accountability Office]] (impoundment findings) — the war on the government's own scorekeepers. ## See Also - [[Government Accountability Office]] - [[Congress]] - [[Power of the Purse]] - [[Legislative Agencies Hub]] - [[CBO Baselines and Scoring Windows]] — the counterfactual and the time horizon a budget estimate is measured against — both chosen, both decisive - [[Dynamic Scoring]] — incorporating macroeconomic feedback into budget estimates, and how a modeling choice relocated a political fight into an assumption - [[Mathematics and Power Hub]] — where quantification meets politics: redistricting optimization, scoring rules, risk models, algorithmic decision systems, and quantitative pseudo-proof - [[Pseudo-Precision as Rhetoric]] — reporting figures to more decimal places than the underlying estimate can support, and why false precision persuades - [[Rate Versus Level]] — the derivative-versus-integral confusion that underwrites most quantitative deception in fiscal and economic politics