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For decades, the Congressional Budget Office has enjoyed a reputation as an island of straight-shooting analysis in a sea of partisan spin. While Democratic and Republican White Houses were putting out self-serving economic projections based on wishful thinking, the CBO made a habit of sticking to facts and honest analysis.
Many feared that the CBO's longstanding independence would be compromised when Republican congressional leaders last year chose Douglas Holtz-Eakin to lead the CBO. Holtz-Eakin had been chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, a group whose relentlessly cheery forecasts had borne little relation to the reality of stagnant growth and skyrocketing deficits over the past four years.
So far, though, the CBO under Holtz-Eakin has maintained its independence. This month, for example, the CBO released a report showing that the benefits of the Bush tax cuts had disproportionately gone to the very top earners while shifting a greater percentage of the overall tax burden to middle-income workers. Some Republicans in the White House and Congress were unhappy with the report, but no one questioned its validity.
Robert Reischauer, a Democrat whose analysis often irritated the Clinton administration and Democratic congressional leaders during his time as director of the CBO, says the job requires someone who wants "to be judged by the quality of his work rather than the number of his well-connected friends." Holtz-Eakin apparently agrees. "The only shield one has in a job like this is your professional credibility," he told the New York Times.
That point of view is at the heart of the CBO's important work. It also should serve as a corrective for all those scientists and scholars who are tempted to allow their work - and their reputations - to be tainted by political or economic considerations.