Congressional Budget Office (CBO) officials would be barred under a bipartisan bill introduced in the House of Representatives earlier this week from adding temporary spending programs to the permanent baseline of government expenditures used in official budget projections.

The proposal — known as the Stop the Baseline Bloat Act of 2025 — comes as pressure is mounting in both political parties in the Senate and House of Representatives to modernize how the CBO assesses and projects the impact of proposed legislation on federal revenues, the nation’s economy, and the government’s overall fiscal health.

Co-sponsoring Republicans Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Marlin Stutzman of Indiana and Democrats Ed Case of Ohio and Marie Gluesenkamp of Washington are leading the effort to move the proposal, which would end a long-standing CBO practice that critics say artificially inflates the cost of government by assuming temporary outlays will continue permanently.

“The Stop the Baseline Bloat Act will increase transparency between the government and the American people, painting a clear and honest picture of how Washington is spending their hard-earned money,” Grothman said in a statement. The CBO cannot continue to create a budget baseline that justifies outrageous spending levels. Getting the country’s fiscal house in order starts with an unbiased CBO baseline.”

“The path out of our growing budget crisis starts with accurate and transparent budgets,” Case declared in the statement. “A budget that inflates prior year spending to conceal real growth year-to-year is neither accurate nor transparent. Our measure would eliminate these budgetary tricks that conceal our dangerous journey into fiscal irresponsibility.”

Also in the statement, Stutzman observed that “taxpayers should not have to spend more because the CBO continually has inaccurate projections for America’s fiscal future. Emergency spending is supposed to address urgent funding needs with non-permanent spending. Instead, the CBO has chosen to treat emergency spending like regular appropriations, inflating discretionary spending.”

Perez of Washington agreed, saying, “[I]n order to seriously take on our national debt and avoid passing it on to our kids, we need to address budgetary distortions that help politicians justify spending through the roof. Our bipartisan bill will remove emergency spending from the baseline set by the Congressional Budget Office, creating a more accurate reflection of our annual spending and how we should responsibly budget for the future.”

Other co-sponsors include GOP Reps. Ben Cline of Virginia and Ralph Norman of South Carolina, along with Democrats Adam Gray of California and Jared Golden of Maine.

As The Washington Stand previously reported, pressure is mounting in Congress to enact fundamental reforms in CBO, which was formed in 1974 to provide Congress, independent from the executive branch, with projections about the fiscal and other effects of federal legislative proposals.

Norman of South Carolina told TWS that he has “no confidence in CBO estimates,” both because they are “unrealistic” and because a CBO official told him “during a budget hearing that ‘illegal immigration pays for itself.’” 

That pressure is not limited to the lower chamber of Congress. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) told TWS that CBO “has consistently missed the mark when it comes to estimating the impact of pro-growth policies, especially tax cuts. Time and again, from President Reagan to President Trump, the CBO’s projections have fallen dramatically short of reality.”

Scott, Norman, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), and other Republicans in Congress and the White House cite CBO’s projection of tax revenue losses due to President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. In fact, federal data shows the government received $3.32 trillion in total revenues in 2017, then $3.33 trillion in 2018, and $3.46 trillion in 2019.

And in 2024, House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) and House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) issued a report blasting CBO for missing the mark in its most recent analysis of the effects of the 2017 tax measure.

“While the Congressional Budget Office provides a valuable service to the Congress, its track record in predicting the economic and fiscal outcome of the 2017 Trump tax cuts is poor to say the least. It’s troubling that the CBO issued a report intended to help policymakers make decisions about future legislative initiatives without ever asking the policymakers they are trying to help for input. Without this input, the studies and analyses are less helpful in the decision-making process and give the appearance of policies being cherry picked for analysis,” Arrington and Smith wrote.

“The truth is, the Trump tax cuts resulted in economic growth that was a full percentage point above CBO’s forecast, and federal revenues far outpaced the agency’s predictions. In fact, under Trump tax policies in 2022, tax revenues reached a record high of nearly $5 trillion, and revenues averaged $205 billion above CBO predictions for the four years following implementation of the law,” Arrington and Smith continued.

The surging congressional support for reforms of CBO is not going unnoticed among the agency’s defenders. University of Maryland Professor of Public Policy Philip G. Joyce acknowledged in a June 12 Substack column that CBO has had its problems in forecasting.

“Is CBO always right? Of course not. It is particularly difficult for them to forecast with any accuracy break points in the economy, such as the timing of recessions. This led, for example, to CBO errantly projecting years of budget surpluses in 2001, contributing to an environment that paved the way for the Bush tax cuts enacted during that year,” Joyce wrote.

“Their estimates of the effects of the Inflation Reduction Act have also drawn suspicion, with a Cato Institute analysis suggesting that the costs would be much higher than initially estimated. (It should be noted that most of the increased estimate results from the revenue effects, and those estimates are done by the Joint Committee on Taxation but incorporated into the CBO cost estimate),” Joyce continued.

The Maryland academic is the author of “The Congressional Budget Office: Honest Numbers, Power and Policymaking.”