CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, too reality-based for the GOP.
The Congressional Budget Office can be a cruel budget master. Sometimes Republicans love its estimates—mostly when it says how expensive some new program will be—and sometimes they hate it, like when it keeps pumping out news about how much more Obamacare is reducing the deficit than they originally projected. Where it is consistent is in objectively reporting that big tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy will increase the deficit, and plenty of Republicans just can't stomach that. So they've been talking for a few months now about how they can skew the CBO to give them the numbers they want.
Rep. Paul Ryan, House Budget Committee Chair and the guy that everybody still inexplicably seems to think is the Republicans' economic wunderkind, wants to force the CBO to use "dyamic scoring," the GOP's special math which has been around since the 1970s. It's a nice companion to trickle-down economics, and assumes that tax cuts will generate so much economic activity that all that growth will offset lost revenue. That's one of the possible ways Republicans can try to implement "fairy dust" as economic policy.
Another possibility, being pushed by Grover Norquist, is to oust current CBO director Doug Elmendorf in favor of a lackey who believes in fairy dust. But this is creating a problem for Republicans, because not everybody has signed on. For example, Michael R. Strain, deputy director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has called for Elmendorf's reappointment, saying "Doug Elmendorf has been so exceptional, he seems to be trying as hard as possible to give a fair, unbiased review of academic literature on all these issues." N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, a former chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, is an Elmendorf supporter as well, argues for continuity and against "ideology and political affiliation."
All of this intra-party argument over Elmendorf has led The Wall Street Journal into some really dumb compromise territory. Why not, they say, just abolish the CBO and its tax revenue score-keeping companion, the Joint Tax Committee? To make this argument really absurd, they write "[l]et the politicians with the authority to make these decisions be accountable for the results." As Jared Bernstein says, "What could go wrong with that?"