It's good to see that the Obama administration is no longer going to allow Elmendorf to delegitimize and pan the legislation coming out of congress.
Elmendorf has established a pattern of analysis on the negative side when it comes to evaluating costs of congressional legislation. I don't know who appointed this man, but it probably wasn't Obama, and there probably is some politics going on.
So Orszag pushing back against the CBO's latest dressing down of congressional legislation is refreshing and hopefully the beginning of a trend. Let's marginaliz Elmendorf and challenge his analyses every step of the way.
White House budget director Peter Orszag on Saturday criticized the agency he used to work for after the Congressional Budget Office issued a cost estimate that has halted momentum for an independent Medicare panel that the Obama administration favors.
In a blog posting on the White House Office of Management and Budget's website, Orszag suggests he is puzzled by the methodology CBO used to estimate cost savings from a proposed Independent Medicare Advisory Council.
Orszag, a former CBO director, wrote, "I can attest that CBO is sometimes accused of bias toward exaggerating costs and underestimating savings. Unfortunately, parts of today's analysis from CBO could feed that perception."
He faulted CBO for "somehow" concluding that the proposed Medicare panel could save tens of billions of dollars per year after 2019 "without specifying precisely how the various modifications would work." He later stated that"CBO seems to have overstepped" by relying on quantitative analysis of long-term effects from legislative proposals instead of qualitative analysis.
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