Transcripts For CSPAN2 Congressional Budget Office Oversight 20180125

Hopefully this will be a really critical hearing. And i think it has the potential to bless a lot of really good information. Good morning. Welcome to the Senate Budget Committee Oversight hearing of the Congressional Budget Office. Im proud to say a 30 year drought, the third such installment of this committee is continued oversight of cbo under my chairmanship. Im glad to see the house Budget Committee will follow our lead with additional oversight hearings later this month. Section 102 a of the congressional budget act of 1974 provides a Budget Committee with authority to review continuing basis of conduct by the Congressional Budget Office of its functions and duties. The oversight hearings resent the committee with an opportunity to review the ceos performance and serve as a forum for discussing ways in which cbo can be more effective and attentive to the needs of congress. Congressional oversight of an office like cbo could also like to clarify the Offices Mission while improving the operations. The first director of cbo instructed staff in a 1976 memo when she said quote our work and publications must always be balanced. Thorough and free of any partisan damage. More than 40 later they still depend on cbo to provide objective, accurate transparent and timely budgetary and Economic Analysis. One of the difficulties with the office of course is that they have to forecast. And that is especially difficult when it is about the future. We do want to have the best possible answers of course, we always want the phrase in our own way. I have been exploring the request for more transparency for getting to see the models. I think we are mostly asking for the main assumptions used to reach your conclusions. If the assumptions are good, and pretty comprehensive, i think well have more confidence in the results. This will be the first of many hearings this year. In 2016 we held 13 hearings to find a better way to budget. The ones i can do without legislation are done. The main one was to give the budget to the minority five days before the budget markup. With amendments that had to be submitted early and so that sidebyside can be developed and better yet, ones that came from both sides of the aisle with similar amendments, could get together for even better solutions. I still have a lot of hope for that. And anticipate doing that again. Last year was a busy time for the Senate Budget committee. We proved to budget resolutions and facilitated consideration of two budget reconciliation bills. One related to healthcare and one that resulted in tax reform legislation for the legislative activity in addition to all of the other proposals considered by our authorized and appropriations committees put intense demand on cbo. In 2017, cbo produced more than 700 formal cost estimates. Several thousand informal test estimates. Nearly 130 appropriations score keeping calculations and 86 analytical reports and working papers. That is a lot of work for an agency that is about 1 10 the size of the Government Accountability office. While i am appreciative of all of the cbo hard work, i also believe we must take the time to review these efforts. We need to look back at what went right. But also, what may have gone wrong. It is crucial that cbo keep its mission firmly in mind. The budget act clearly lays out the mission in section 202 when we can read it shall be the primary duty and function of the office to provide the committees on the budget of both houses information which will assist such committees in the discharge of all matters within their jurisdiction. This important section refers to cbo was role in assisting and supporting the committee and members in the execution of their duties. And it is always helpful to remember that cbo exists for this purpose. Testifying before us today we have the cbo director, keith hall. He oversees all eight cbo divisions which are tasked with producing statutorily required budget and economic forecasts. Thousands of cost estimates proposed legislation and special reports as requested by congress. Cbos budget analysis as part of the legislative process. Dr. Hall we left appeared before the committee in 2016 to discuss cbos operations give us an update on the agencies progress for several important goals. In addition to reviewing cbos work in support of recent legislative initiatives must remain interested in those goals to increase the transparency of Agency Analysis and operations. And your agencies responsiveness to congressional needs. I am specifically interested in learning how cbos views regarding modeling transparency and ways the agency can more clearly communicate the method, assumptions and data underlying budget analysis. Dr. Hall, i also welcome your thoughts on how cbo can more efficiently allocate existing resources. Including staff responsibilities to satisfy these congressional requests and expectations. In 2018 and beyond, cbo will continue to play a key role in supporting congress as we consider the budget and economic effects of proposed legislation. Its objectivity, accuracy, transparency and timeliness is essential to help Congress Make informed decisions. Just as cbos role in the federal budget process is crucial. So too, is this Committee Statutory responsibility for overseeing cbo. I would like to thank doctor hall for joining us today and i look forward to our discussion. Senator sanders. Thank you, mr. Chairman and doctor hall for being here. I think before we do oversight over the cbo, it might be a good idea to do oversight over this committee. It might be a good idea for the Budget Committee to actually produce a budget. And it was a radical idea. But that is what we want to do. Maybe it might be a good idea for the republican leadership, 116 days into the fiscal year, actually do something more to give a shortterm budget resolution. The truth is, as any business person in america will tell you, you cant run any kind of entity on a monthtomonth basis. We are a 4 trillion entity. That is what the United States government is. There are some agencies clearly that need more funding. There are some agencies that need less funding. And the idea that we are saying that every agency of government, every month we get exactly the same amount of money that they previously got, because of continuing resolution is not set. I suspect if anyone looked at it he would find they were wasting tens and tens of billions of dollars. Funding agencies that perhaps do not need the money. Funding agencies that are clearly inefficient. We are not addressing that can be keep kicking the can down the road. That is the most important thing that we have got to do. And that is the responsibility of dr. Hall. He is doing his job. Their people are doing their job. It is our responsibility. Mr. Chairman, it seems to me that we have got to address and maybe this committee can play a more active role in pushing our colleagues forward on this thing. We have got to address the budget crisis that we have. Dont just address some of the issues which i think we are all familiar with that have got to be addressed as we desperately try to come up with a 2018 annual budget. First of all, we have the moral issue. Of 800,000 young people in this country who were raised in this country, who only know the United States as their home. Are on the verge of facing deportation. Let me be very clear about this. If we do not address this issue, i think history will look back at this particular moment and see an incredible moral stain about doing this to these young people. What we have also got to do, is create a budget which provides clarity. Another is a great desire to see more money that we could argue about for defense. But the bottom line is for every dollar that we spend on defense, we have got to spend on the needs of working families. Five minutes ago i just came from my office. Where i talked to parents and administrators at the Head Start Program in vermont. They are telling me as i am sure that they are telling you in your offices, that children all over the country. Little kids, three and four years of age are being impacted by the opioid crisis. Kids are being taken out of their homes because their parents are addicted and they are going into foster homes. We have a crisis. We are not dealing with that crisis. Unbelievably, mr. Chairman, we have 27 Million People in this country who utilize Community Health centers. To get the health care, dental care, lowcost prescription drugs, Mental Health counseling that they need. 27 Million People. One out of four people in my own home state we have not reauthorized the Community Health program. 30,000 vacancies at the veterans administration. So instead of giving speeches about how much we love veterans, why do we make sure that the va is adequately funded and adequately staffed . Some of you have seen a piece in the Washington Post last month. Unbelievable 10,000 people with disabilities died last year. While they were submitting claims to the Social Security administration who does not have the staff for the funding to process those claims. 10,000 americans with disabilities died. Are we going to adequately fund the Social Security administration . Were we present a continuing resolution leaving them mostly underfunded . In parts of my state and a part of your state mr. Chairman, i am sure, there are communities that do not have adequate broadband. How do you bring businesses into those communities . How do kids do their homework there is not adequate broadband . In other words, there are enormous needs facing the American People. And those needs are not just giving you tax breaks to billionaires were trying to throw 30 Million People off of healthcare. There are needs that we have got to address. Mr. Chairman, i would hope that we have a serious debate about the budget of the United States of america. Can we do it as soon as we can. Dr. Hall, thank you for being with us. Thank you senator sanders. I appreciate your remarks and i have made a number of notations here. We will have more hearings during this year and i think that i would be interested in what different members of the committee would be interested in, particularly pursuing in some death, as kind of a task force for oversight for us. So that we can do a better job of budgeting. I witnessed this morning is dr. Hall, then a director of the Congressional Budget Office. Director hall is no stranger to this committee having served as the cbo director since april 2015. Since that time he has appeared before this committee to discuss cbos work and the projections for the nations fiscal situation. He has more than 25 years of service. With the International Trade commission, with george mason university, the bureau of labor statistics, the White House Council of economic advisors, the department of commerce and internationally economist for the itc. He is also an assistant professor at the university of arkansas and internationally economist at the department of treasury. Those positions we work with a wide variety of topics including labor market analysis, policy, Economic Conditions and Macro Economic analysis and Forecasting International Economic Policy and partial equilibrium modeling. Which i hope you will not explain this morning. [laughter] he has a phd and a masters in economics from purdue university. This morning, dr. Hall will be talking with us about cbos work over the last year and the goals he has set out for the critically important agency. Look forward to receiving your testimony. For the information. Director hall will take seven minutes for his opening. Welcome, dr. Hall. Chairman, Ranking Member sanders and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me here to discuss the Congressional Budget Office. As you know the mission is providing nonpartisan budgetary Economic Analysis to support the work of this committee and the congress as a whole. My colleagues and i are devoted to that mission. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss how cbo has executed this year and how we plan to expand our work in the future. I also want to take this opportunity to thank you for your support and guidance. We at cbo have relied on the Budget Committee to explain to others in progress what our goal is. To provide constructive feedback on how we can best serve congress. And to provide guidance and legislative development occurring in what the Congress Says priorities are. That work on your part has been key to our success over the years. In the past years, we have provided congress with 740 formal cost estimates and mandate statements. We have also provided thousands of hours of Technical Assistance to committees. Which have included thousands of informal cost estimates. Probably more work than the former cost estimates. We provided 128 scorekeeping tabulations. 86 analytical reports and working papers. Dozens of files of data underlying budget and Economic Projections and numerous other publications. Many of the cost estimates were produced under very tight time constraints and required extraordinary efforts by the staff to meet legislative deadlines. We also undertook new initiatives to enhance our responsiveness and transparency. We reorganize work processes and shifted resources in areas of high demand. They published more evaluations of our projections about the economy, spending and Health Insurance subsidies. We documented more of our analytic methods on flood insurance, pension benefit, guarantees and healthcare for the military, for example. We give more examples of changes in our estimates addressing issues ranging from Social Security to options for changing medicare. In the next two years, cbo plans to continue to support the Budget Committees and the congress by producing economic baseline projections, reports about the projections and cost estimates for many proposals including all legislation recorded by committees. Other major things will include a variety of policy options that would reduce budget deficits, reports on the longterm budget outlook, analysis of the present budget proposals, Monthly Budget reviews, policy analysis on a broad range of topics of interest among the Congressional Committees. We are reviewing and updating every aspect of the simulation model of Health Insurance coverage. Which forms the backbone of the budget projection related to federal healthcare funding for people younger than 65. In addition cbo will further develop its capabilities to assess the macroeconomic effects of policies and the ways a change in federal regulations affect the agencies baseline projections. Responsiveness and transparency are Top Priorities mine. We have plans to bolster them further. We will make greater use of Team Approaches to handle surges in demand for analysis of particular issues. We will increase public documentation of the computer models. We also do more to explain how analysts employ those tools as part of the process for producing estimates. I like to think of this as documenting our process as well as our models. For a cost estimate for example, an analyst identifies the ways in which a proposal might affect the budget and assesses which ofthem would probably have substantial effects. The analyst also consults experts and examines the most relevant data and research to form a basis for the estimate. Which includes determining which models to use, if any, what information you put into the models and how to use their output in combination with other available information. In short, cbo models do not produce estimates. Cbo does. The models are just a few of the tools that we use to produce our estimates. We will make, will be able to make significant process in our plans to boost response and transparency if we receive funding for fiscal year 2018 within the range of the senate and House Appropriations committee is have recommended. If we receive the funding available under the continuing resolution in effect this year, we will make less progress. Moreover, our ability to buy data in research and paper other activities would be severely limited under the funding specified in the continuing resolution and the agencies performance of this would be degraded. Many initiatives could be undertaken only if cbo had more employees. We submitted budget request for hiring a new Staff Members in 2019 to bolster the responsiveness and transparency. As part of a plan to hire 20 additional people by 2021. The new staff would help cbo respond to request information more quickly. When there is a surge in demand. They would also allow cbo to supply more information about analysis and models without reducing the valuable services it provides to congress in the current staffing level. The next two years, cbo also proposed to expand analytical capability by adding new healthcare analysts and creating additional onsite capacity for sensitive data. Im glad to talk to about our today and anytime in the future as well. Happy to meet with members of congress to chat on the phone. In addition our employees meet frequently with Congressional Staff to explain our analysis and answer questions individually in groups. We have plans to be in better contact. Francis, earlier this month, in collaboration with the Research Service my colleagues gave presentations 150 congressional Staff Members about how cbo develops estimates about Health Insurance for cost and coverage. We are constantly looking for ways to serve your needs better and i welcome your suggestions. Thank you, director hall. Now we have questions let me explain the process. Each member will have five minutes for questions beginning with myself and then senator sanders. Following us will alternate questions between the republicans and minority. All members in attendance when the hearing started will be recognized in order of seniority on their side. For those who arrived after the hearing began, you on the list in order of arrival. If it is your time to be recognized that you are not available, we move you to the bottom of the list and attend to the next center to ask questions. With that, i have a few questions. A recent legislative proposal introduced the house and senate would require cbo to publicly disclose its models and data. You mentioned that in your testimony, the intent of this legislation is to increase transparency and allow for outside analysts reproduce and replicate cbo projections. While you have made significant strides to open up cbos work to the public, what efforts are currently underway at cbo to increase transparency further both for congress and the public . Do you think disclosing this data would improve legislative process and Public Confidence in the final product and how would it vary from sharing more assumptions that are used . Thank you. We are committed to transparency. I have certainly, been trying to increase transparency. One thing we have tried to do is do this intelligently. Treat our decisions on transparency as Good Business decisions for us. There are lots of ways of being transparent. Different ways of being transparent have different benefits to congress. And they have different costs. With respect to benefits, who we directly transparency to our, are we being more transparent to members or staff or are we be more transparent to outside experts . And of course the cost. There can be significant time and resources used to become more transparent. You have to make a benefit cost tradeoff analysis when we do this. Part of what we are doing for example is have some ideas on being more transparent. We are calling them pilots because we want to try them and see how that is received by congress. If that is the sort transparency that you are most interested in. One of the things we are doing for example, is a complete rewrite of our main models for healthcare insurance estimates. That rewrite will happen over the next year but to give you an idea, we have plans to, since i have been on board, we have plans to completely redo this model. And so it has been three years. We would have been finished by now if over the past year we knock in so many healthcare related requests. The people who were busy updating the model were busy doing cost estimates. That fits in with my next question. Which is that colleagues say they are unable to receive estimates on legislation in a timely manner. But cbo has plenty of time to release a number of other projects and reports. How would you respond to that complaint . Are these results of a congressional request or are they agency initiated . Can cbo provide a list of published reports did not originate due to specific congressional requests were not directly contribute to a single requesting office . Thank you for asking after my first came on board you expressed concern about that. Were not started a single analytical report since i have been a director without having specific congressional and Congressional Committee expressed interest. We simply do not do analytical reports just on our own. We square that away first. Second of course, we have lots of different areas of expertise. When we are really busy on healthcare, we only have 70 people weight can pull into healthcare. So we have time for other people working on other reports. We do our best to not let our analytical reports at all interfere with our work on cost estimates, for example. Work working on developing models for cost estimates. How do you prioritize those requests for reports . We look to committees. We try not to prioritize things ourselves. We get way more work than we can possibly handle. What we do is we look to committees of jurisdiction and ask them what are their priorities. And we follow their priorities. One of the more frustrating things that i have to do is i get calls from members sometimes who have a piece of legislation they would like cbo to look at. If we are really busy, with committee work, we have to ask committee if we can make this a priority and often the answer is no. Our work takes party. We have to put off work. I know that is frustrating but again, we are trying to take direction from committees how to direct our resources. We will be looking into whether there is a role for the Ranking Member for the chairman of the Budget Committee to have more of a role in that ranking and my time has expired almost. So i will turn it over to senator sanders. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Dr. Hall, as we contemplate, maybe someday passing a budget here, could you help me refresh my memory but, my recollection is that in the budget control act of 2011, one of the cornerstones of the bill was parity. He will funding for defense and nondefense. If i am correct, the next three budgets that were passed also had parity as a cornerstone. Is that correct . That sounds right, yes. Dr. Hall, my republican colleagues have spent a lot of time this year on healthcare. And if my recollection is correct, your agency has been criticized a bit for the analysis that they provided us on various healthcare proposals. Lets go over it again. I think the consensus is that you are right in your analysis. But bottom line is, that on january 17, 2017, cbo scored the socalled restoring americans healthcare freedom reconciliation act. We have to do something about these titles. They should be a truth in advertising also but which was vetoed by president obama. Cbo found that 32 million fewer people would have Health Insurance after 10 years. And that average premiums for the nongroup market would almost double by 2026. Does that sound correct . That is correct. The only thing i was eight is also relative to a baseline. It is expected to change in coverage. On may 24, cvs for the American Healthcare act as passed by the house. Cbo found that 23 million fewer people would have Health Insurance after 10 years. Does that sound about right . X yes, it does. In other words, what cbo did is made the obvious conclusion that when you substantially cut federal funding on healthcare, lo and behold, people lose their Health Insurance. I will not ask you to comment on this. But i think you came up with the obvious conclusion. But because you came up with that conclusion which was not terribly palatable to some of my colleagues, you were criticized. And i think that is unfortunate. I think we should let these guys do their jobs. And come up with their objective conclusions without attacking them because we do not like the conclusions they have. Let me go to another area. After trying to draw tens of millions of people of the Health Insurance, my republican colleagues then took a look at taxes in the United States. Am i correct in saying that cbos analysis said that the legislation that was finally passed would add more than 1. 7 trillion to the deficit with interest cost included . Does that sound about right . Quests i would have to give credit to our colleagues in the joint committee on taxation that did the actual hard work. I know but that sounds about right, right . Yes. Am i correct in saying that the analysis would add more than 1 trillion to the deficit even when we use dynamic scoring . Is that representation . Thats right. Will not ask you to comment on this but after day month after month a part about world collapsing adding to the deficit for the national debt. It is not your issue. Some of my colleagues apparently forgot about what they gave us over and over again about deficit spending. Dr. Hall, on november 8, cbo we estimated the effects of repealing the Affordable Care act. A socalled individual mandate. Cbo estimated that the change would increase the number of uninsured people by 13 million within 10 years. An increase premiums by about 10 percent in any given year. Does that sound consistent with what you told us . It does. More recently, on january 11, cbo estimated the cost of extending the childrens Health Insurance program for 10 years. You projected that a 10 year extension would actually save the government 6 billion. Does that sound about right . Yes, it does. All right, let me conclude by saying that i think under a lot of pressure, your agency is trying to do the objective work that is expected of you. And that i hope that some of my colleagues would refrained from attacking the agency because the results that you produce are not something that they are comfortable with. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Senator johnson. You, mr. Chairman. Dr. Hall, i want to go to kind of the question the chairman was engaged in. In terms of who decides what you score. I guess, who do you report to . The reason im asking is that after the election, knowing that we are going to be bring up healthcare, started to request scores on what would happen if we were to repeal market reforms . I did not get very far. On march 23, 2017, i sent a letter to you. Signed by the chairman and 20 of my other colleagues. 22 republican senators requesting, pretty simple, we requested the Congressional Budget Office in consultation estimate their budgetary effects of repealing the obamacare insurance regulations. Now, you are where the reason we need that, first want to understand what policies might cause, but also there is no way that we could even bring it in front of the senate we do not have a score to present. So this is a basic piece of information we needed. I want to know, why did we ever get that score . Again, this is four months before this came to a head. The only response we got is cant do it. You do all kinds of different things. Okay, you make all kinds of estimates. I will talk next about the estimate of the number of people losing insurance. Simple, why did we get an answer . 22 republican senators asked for this analysis. What would it cost the government if we repealed those market reforms . I can tell you that our health group was just working flat out for months. This was in march. Even in march, they were working flat out. One of the things that is underrated, i tried to make the point that we do a tremendous amount of what i call, Technical Assistance. Where we are getting draft legislation from a committee of jurisdiction then that will ultimately wind up being real legislation. Again, i will file this in private. I want to find out exactly why we did not get this. I want to move on to the question of insurance coverage. Your scores under obamacare, used the march 2016 baseline. Which again, by law you had to do that. But it is also true that january 2017 you created another baseline in terms of people with insurance coverage. Correct . Yes. In the score, of course this was the grenade that cbo through into the healthcare debate that pretty much poisoned the well. He said in 2018, 13 transport 15 million american millions will lose healthcare. That is broken on 7 million in the individual market, 4 million medicaid and 4 million for the employer. The problem is that with the march baseline if you compared to the most recent baseline in january there would have been no additional uninsured. That would have gone away and we wouldve been left with 8 million, 4 million dropping medicaid or bridge and 4 million on employer. I can understand without a mandate why people might lose employer coverage. Why would people drop premeditate . Just vote in terms of the estimate work 2026. 15 million through the 22 million. Again, 7 million would be excluded because yorty update your estimate that there would be nobody losing coverage on the individual market based on your january 2017 baseline. So that leaves 15 Million People. 227. 15 Million People are losing medicaid. Now again, you can say people are going to drop basically free coverage because there is not an individual mandate. It makes no sense whatsoever to me. It makes no sense. So i had a conversation, one of the most frustrating i had ever had with and that i asked for the cbo and their latest replacement piece of legislation to break up Medicaid Expansion versus medicaid and you do that, and i appreciate that. It was also very helpful. But i asked a simple thing. You compared your coverage estimates with your march 2016 baseline. But because you also have a new baseline, why dont you just put that into an alternate scenario . The response i got would only take two weeks. You have got the baseline right here showing 19 Million People uninsured on the individual. 19 million under the senate bill. 1919 is zero. I can do that in seconds. Why did he refuse to provide the American People the information that would have been freaking them out. Where we could have looked at this analysis and say well, okay. 8 Million People losing, for on the market, for on medicaid. We are probably looking at fort. Why did you provide the alternate scenario . Well, first of all, it is not clear that the alternate scenario would have gotten the different numbers that you suggest. Let me just put it that way. Because they are changing the baseline and it had to effects. The premiums were higher, while at the same time the coverage is lower. Also, when we talk about the 15. Lets go back to the 15 million dropping medicaid. It is really, most of that is not a decline in medicaid but it is a, the legislation and in the expansion medicaid. So those were people who primarily dont have medicaid and wont get it over the next 10 years we would have under current law at the time. So we are not really talk about people dropping medicaid. This is just a simple math. You can come up with an estimate and compare this against the baseline. And youre not providing the American People with the information. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Again, it will be an opportunity at the end to submit additional questions and we might want to have answered. Next, senator van hollen. Thank you senator, chairman. Welcome dr. Hall. Senator sanders covers some of the questions i wanted to ask about. I want to ask about the impact of crs. We heard from the pentagon spokesperson a few weeks ago that going from cr to cr we now have four results in wasteful spending and they have negative consequences for the defense. Does going from cr to cr make your work at cbo harder and what of the consequences of it . Well, it does make things harder. Weve actually put off some things, computer work and things like that. If we continue under a cr right now i think we have to curtail our hiring and move down a few slots. You will probably have to cancel some training and travel in that sort of thing. It does have a consequence for us. It does sort of degrade in terms of planning, does it make the planning harder . Does that lead to some inefficiencies in terms of your higher when you need to hire . Yes, it does. Was looking at the chip program and scoring. They reauthorized the Insurance Program for six years. As was referenced, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would have actually saved money i think you said, 6 billion compared to the earlier baseline. Is that right . Yes. And, your analysis of savings was not as a result of the cost of providing Healthcare Services to these children going down. Was it . No. It was the cost of the alternative going up, right . Thats right. The alternative is the healthcare provided in the Affordable Care act exchange primarily. Is that right . Yes. The primary reason the cost went up is as a result of the fact that the elimination of the individual mandate resulted, according to cbo, and the cost of premiums going up by 10 percent. Is that right . Yes. I think this is an important point for people to understand that the reason the cost of providing services to chip went down, is because those children, if they were denied that alternative through the childrens Health Insurance program, would have gone into the Affordable Care act exchanges. And as a result of the individual mandate removal, being the primary cause, the cost to the taxpayer would go up because when those premiums go up, we all pay a higher tax credit to help meet the needs of those individuals. Is that right . That is correct. That really is my it just shows that when you do one thing to pull the rug out of the Affordable Care act, and you get rid of the individual mandate, you increase the premiums by 10 percent. And so, that meant that if he did not extend the childrens Health Insurance program, those kids coming into the Affordable Care act exchanges would have been paying higher premiums as a result of tax credits that we provide people to measure the healthcare in the exchanges is affordable. It would have gone up. So, yes, it is greatly extended Health Insurance program. And we saved 6 billion. But the savings was relative to the baseline. In the baseline cost went up primarily because of the move of the tax bill to get rid of the individual mandate. So, i just hope members will understand the consequences of their actions with respect to actually saving taxpayers money and providing an important benefit to our kids health. And i really do appreciate the Congressional Budget Office because sometimes you know, some of us agree with your analysis and sometimes we disagree with the analysis. But my goodness, if we do not have some kind of referee here in the nicest congress, would have even more of a freeforall that we already have. And we already have a hell of a freeforall. I am grateful for somebody being able to take an objective look at this and provide an analysis that we can use. There are too many we are already having a dispute nationally over what is fact and fiction. Im grateful that you provide us a baseline for what is fact. At least as it regards to the budget. Thank you, mr. Chair. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you dr. Hall for being here. I would like to talk about partisanship. I found three things this morning in a bipartisan way that i agree with the Ranking Member today. I want to put that into record. Number one i agree with the first opening comments about we need to be serious about budget process and recognize that it is broken. The second thing is we all want to find a way to solve the daca issue. The third maybe most important we need to find a way to simplify the titles and bills around here. I also want to agree with my colleague, senator van hollen. You are attempting to be an objective source for information modeling and anticipation and projecting the impact of potential legislation. I want to talk about how to achieve that. First of all, this is the most partisan, one of the most partisan committees that i have seen. I was on judiciary and is partisan as well but this is a partisan committee and unnecessarily so. But it is partisan because of the budget process. Members of the other side of the committee, several members, senator whitehouse and senator kane. Members on the side, i think we all agree that the process is broken and it creates a situation because the budget is not a law, it is a resolution. Therefore the majority ran down the throat of the minority, their political statement about what they think that they should do in spending. You get caught in the middle. Once id like your opinion and the other side does not like your opinion. This will change at some point in the future. They will be the majority will be the minority. Nobody will like it. This is a broken process. We need to fix it. In the meantime you play an important role. I think its absolutely critical that you are being as nonpartisan as you can be. I have two questions quickly. One of them is, i agree with the chairman and Ranking Member that they should be involved in the priorities of what you are allocating time and resources to be heard very important questions being asked during the healthcare debate as well as the tax debate that did not get answered. How do you respond to that . And then i want to talk about how you are assuring that we maintain a nonpartisan position in here . Very quickly. Im sorry, on the priorities, would you just that quickly . One of the difficult things for us is we do so much Technical Assistance. Which often leads to a formal cost estimate. But we are looking at legislation, given feedback and formal estimates. That is so often done by a committee or leadership. And they wanted done confidentially because it is sort of Technical Assistance. We wind up doing a lot of work over time with the Budget Committee would not know what we are working on. And we cannot tell them that. So we have developed what we think is the most effective thing we can do. And that is when we have or when we are jammed up on topics we look to the committee of jurisdiction to tell them, we have these things going on. Tell us what your priority is. The ultimate priority really exists in the form resides in the Budget Committee, right . Thats right. Let me go back to one other thing. In terms of partisanship. This is before your time. I think you can be objected to the response. The question is how to avoid this in the future. It is one thing to disagree with productions. It is inevitable the reality and compare back to the projections which is what we do. In 2013 cbo predicted that obama care enrollment in the individual market for years 2015, 2016 and 2017 would be 13 Million People, 24 laypeople and 26 Million People respectively. The actual amount was 11 million, 12 million intently. We see 100 percent error like that raises questions in my mind about impartiality. Particularly, when the author estimates, the head of the cvs Health Analysis group was formally the head of Hillary Clinton 1993 Healthcare Task force. Have to ask the question, how do you ensure, you were not there then. Going forward, how do we assure ourselves that we are getting a nonpartisan objective point to the senators viewpoint earlier . We do a lot to try to seek guidance and advice from experts on both sides. We actually do our best to go back and look at how we did. We have been back and looked at how the estimates turned out there. Going thing i would say, in defense of course, sometimes it is really hard to estimate these things. Sure. I think one of the conclusions i would make going back, certainly with the exchanges we were off. We are not as far off as things on like actual spending. Everybody else was as well. If everybody in fact, will probably more accurate than most others. That does not give me a lot of comfort. [laughter] i know but it goes to the issue of bias. We can be off and we can be wrong. But hopefully were not consistently wrong. I am disturbed that we were consistently overestimated for example the exchange participation. We tried to fix it and we still overestimate. We fix it and you know i have a background in economic data. And when you do economic data, we do not want to have revisions all one way. You wanted to be revised up and down. That is what we would like to have. But we try very hard. We try with the process and try to do it that way. And we tried to be transparent. Thank you. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Senator whitehouse. Thank you, chairman. First let me echo what my friend senator perdue has just said. We have seen the Budget Committee become 100 percent partisan. And zero percent meaningful. In fact, the most important work that we do here is not even budget work. It is simply the Political Task by the majority of opening the procedural gateway to another partisan, political effort down the road in the senate. Short of that, we dont need dr. Hall, we do not need staff, we dont need anything because we do not do anything in this committee. There is a reason that over and over again with committee hearings. Even nominally on the budget of the United States. And nobody even bothered to show up in the audience. I guess people know perfectly well thats what we do here has exactly 0 effect. Once appropriators got accustomed to beating a 60 vote margin in the Senate Appropriations bills, the Budget Committees penalty for breaking our budget, which is, you have to get 60 votes. Made us useless. The fact that we only looked at appropriated funds. Not the four large amount of money that goes sloshing out through the back door of the tax code. Not the healthcare expenditures of the country. Just contributes to my sense that we have made ourselves a useless committee. And that is something i am extremely eager to correct on a bipartisan basis. The issue that bedeviled us, i think the most here, is the healthcare cost issue. Dr. Hall, i think youve seen you do these before. This is one of my least favorite graphs that has Life Expectancy in years among the leading developed countries. And because per capita in healthcare. Basically, all of our major competitors are here in this kind of competition. We are way out here. We cost a fortune more per capita than any other industrialized country. And we have Life Expectancy comparable to chile and the czech republic. It is not like we are making Massive Health gains with massive expenditure. So, you guys do some really good work. And this is to me, one of the more interesting things that i have seen. The redline on the top is the projection for federal healthcare spending that was made back here. That was in august 2010. In january 2017, this experience, the actual greenline then got baked into a new projection. The new projection for this 10 year period is lower by the amount of this green blocks then went cbo previously estimated. That reduction is 3. 3 trillion in healthcare savings. If we can pass something in the senate and in the house that gave us 3. 3 trillion in healthcare savings, that would be one of the most significant things that we could do. The problem is, we dont know exactly why that happened. That is a combination of early experience and algorithms that you guys run to make your projections with that we do not have a lot of transparency into. So, to me, if youre looking at the possibility of multiple trains of dollars in future healthcare savings, it ought to be a Bipartisan Party of the committee and of your office to be trying to figure out and explain, what are the things that can help make that happen . What are the things that might even dial it up a little bit . If you can get 3. 3 trillion, why not 6. 6 trillion . So, i hope if we are going to spend more money on staff, this becomes a really important priority. Explain why. Because if you can explain why, we can try to do more of it. I will say that we have Accountable Care organizations. Provider Accountable Care organizations in rhode island. It is basically doctors offices that have agreed to sign up for placing a bet that they can get better care at lower cost to their patients. And in return, they do not just get paid for procedures and prescriptions. They get a bonus from cms doing a good job. Some of the best in the country are in rhode island. And they are seeing their cost per patient, actually go down year over year. And they are generating millions of dollars in savings just in their little local practices. So, somehow there is a connection between being able to save 3. 3 trillion over the 10 years in healthcare expense and these local experiences that we are all seen. In our provider and other how to maximize that to me, i think is a job worth doing in a committee that otherwise appears to have no purpose. So, i look forward to working with you on that dr. Hall. Baffles right into our category of analytical reports that we do. It is exactly the sort of thing that we like to look at that is really of interest budget wise. And explain things. Thank you. And at the beginning of 2016, we said the budget process was broken and we did 13 hearings and had a number of things that we had hoped that we would pass before the election. So we would not know who the president was going to be more than majority would be. But we did not have enough people involved in that process. So it got stopped before the election. Do not give up hope, mr. Chairman i want and i am planning on doing some hearings based on taskforces led by individuals on this Committee Bipartisan and suspect that you have an intense interest in healthcare. Senator cotton. Welcome to the committee. I am sad to hear that the senator of rhode island and senator of georgia agree that bipartisan. I suspect i was added to make it more bipartisan. I think it will matter to both sides of the house. It is just about the way that the cbo interact with members of the committee and members of congress as a whole. The way they respond to requests for information from us. I will use an example. The analysis that cbo did last fall about medicaid coverage losses. Under one version of the healthcare elements. Im not sure which one it was. Some of your analysts came to the republican conference made to explain i think it was a 5 million loss under medicaid. And that analysis turns out to have assumed that some number of the 18 none expansion states would expand medicaid by previous decisions not to since the 2010 law. If our bill was passed though states with and decide to drop medicaid. When asked which states would be doing that, and especially texas and florida will be doing it, the two largest expansion states, since we did not have one of us to expand we cannot even get to 5 million in total population. The analyst told us that cannot answer that, they do not make that kind of prediction. They were just going on past programs and so forth. I found that pretty astonishing. I mean, it is more of a political judgment than economic assessment. And there is just no good explanation for why they reached that conclusion. And i found that to be fairly consistent with my study cbo reports. Which are usually pretty good when it comes to government revenues and outlays. But it leaves something to be desired when it comes to things like political judgment or market incentives and so they are private individuals and i believe that those assumptions are rarely made adequately public or explained. And it makes it harder for us to do our job and harder for the public to understand the kind of projections you are making. Let me stop there and see if you would like to respond to that. Sure. We are not particularly happy about having to make that sort of assumption. But it is absolutely key to understanding the proposal. That how many states will choose to expand or not expand. If we choose no one would expand, that is an assumption. That would affect our numbers if we chose that someone expand, we are trying to do that. We try best to look at past history and what we did is put states into buckets. We have different buckets. More likely to expand, less likely, in the middle. And we actually did put this date in there but the thinking was we did not want to talk about particular states. Because if you are wrong about a state in a wrong bucket here and it should be over here, there should be one state here that should be there. So i do not want to go into the details of that particular analysis but my point is that was a very small universal data. 18 data points. It is not millions of data points as you often use. The kind of analysis and assumptions you just made was not explicit in the report we received. Took four of your analysts coming to explain that to us in detail for senders to understand it. And certainly for the American People to understand. Why not make that public to do Something Like you know, different Scenario Analysis . And making your assumptions more explicit . Both for us and the public . We are happy to try and start doing more of that. My only dissent at this point is we all have so many people, so much time and that these are tradeoffs. But if congress, if you want more time spent on that sort of transparency, we will do it. How many people do you have . On healthcare, lets do healthcare first. We have 40 people. The people who are really engaged is probably less than 20 people in all of the estimates. At a private consulting firms i know how to understand a spreadsheet but that was refused. Is that an appropriate response . No. We would like to be better. If i have a future question that i would be welcome to sit at somebodys desk . Do i never refused to talk with a member to talk about something. Senator kennedy . Thanks for coming today cbo has a welldeserved reputation to be a neutral arbiter and i understand you work under a lot of pressure. You and all of your people are very bright. That much is clear to me. You are serving us but you also serve the American People. I will make a couple of suggestions about what we need but more importantly from the people. Number one, you have got to move more quickly. I know that is easy for me to say but for a variety of reasons the pace is quickened and we are in the middle of discussing an issue. Number two youve got to be clearer. It doesnt do any good, i dont want to overstate this which is why i am prefacing with how extraordinary is the work that i think that you do but the analysis has to be thorough but also written in non but also written in non swahili so the press can pick it up to say okay, here are the conclusions and why the cbo reached these conclusions and the assumptions they are making. You can accompany that with a long phd dissertation type of module but most important is we get it quickly and the American People have an opportunity to understand it better. That isnt because the American People are stupid, they are not most americans dont read aristotle every day but they will figure it out im just adjusting we can all do a better job to help them do that that is my only comment i know it is easy to criticize and money money monday morning quarterback and with your welldeserved reputation i say that gently and with the spirit of gratitude. I thank you have identified the two biggest problems that we have is the responsiveness and transparency and unfortunately sometimes they collide. So we have been keen to see how we can improve that process and also why we are asking for resources. Thank you for being here today. We appreciate any more ideas. Mr. Chairman thanks for being here and also mr. Hall and our purpose is to help you get the job done. One of the things that you know better you are in the central position we cannot do things many times without you weighing into that beside yourself for gao is how much that adversely affects the ability of congress to do this job and that is a huge deal. I know you have problems with resources but you need to measure things but how many times that is accurate sometimes it isnt sometimes it is because of the fact there is a mistake to be made but it is very difficult so it would be helpful to know those areas versus a gas but you can only do that through metrics to have the ability to check yourselves out and i dont think that is happening right now. Can you talk about that . If you dont have the resources and what does it take for us to give you that ability . I do think regardless of what we do, we need to have that information for decision. To call the analysis of actuals where we sit down and look at the budget categories and see what happened during the year and what we predicted. So if i have a meeting how will we adjust the view Going Forward . It sounds like it may help if we publish the analysis so you can see exactly how we did. But the tricky part is the budget categories are larger than pieces of legislation but it gives you an idea where we are more or less accurate. Running into disagreements where the Committee Staff truly are experts in particular areas have if it cant disagreements there is a dialogue to work out those differences to change your perspective of what is going on. One thing that we now do is when we get pieces of legislation and the committee has data or analysis, we ask for that and now to go further independently but we want to be sure of the committee feels we have given them a fair look at what they have looked at that is an important starting point to be sure we are just as objective. When you were here last time you talked about the problems of retaining qualified people and also i thank you said over the past three years in your testimony morning 60 of those have made offers in academic positions so it felt like that is a huge problem to his knowledge that so what do we do to help you get the people that you need and retain people . One of the things that has changed is we were capped all salaries had to be below a members salary or below my salary so while they were competing against the executive branch they have a higher pay scale to make as much as 30,000 more than more than i make or anybody at cbo. Now we can pay senior managers as much as the executive scale. Not that we will but we now have that flexibility that will be important to retain the top people so that was a good move. Retaining and recruiting . Yes. Thank you mr. Chairman. I appreciate the input from the members today that we need to do to improve the process. One thing you had in your opening comment that stuck with me that has been echoed a little bit that have you considered serving as the aggregator collecting estimate from the thinking reporting that as part of the transparency as well as what you have come up with . Is that a potential solution . We are happy to do what we are asked to do but with cvo you get consistent quality we work very hard not to be biased in this is an issue where we make models available. That is part of the advantage but we run the models if we went to get input from the think tanks that is a good idea and we do talk to them to get their views on how we do things we would be happy to try to do that more whether they will spend a lot of time producing competing estimates for the small stuff we do isnt realistic but i do think there is value to have you assure you that we talk to them to get their view. I heard a lot today there is general agreement we have a broken process i have watch this for a while and shared this i know most budgets dont last more than 40 days before there is a waiver and only takes 60 votes that is usually the same amount to pass legislation so it is virtually 100 assured and one of the things from the hearings that we did was the acting Ranking Member that there ought to be a higher threshold for higher numbers we should consider that to have any possibility to make a difference we will hold hearings and review that material. From today some of the other things i did hear a lot of people to know it has been the most partisan sense 19741st initiated and the process has been for the Majority Party to hold Opening Statements so the other side can comment on the budget we never considered that to be fair so we change that process now we get five days in advance that helps to expedite the markup and the hearing now in exchange everybody has to turn in their amendment so now what we have learned when those amendments come in early there is a seed of possibility and every one of those sometimes you have to let them grow more often look at the same seeds being planted by both sides the people cannot get together to come up with a common one and that is what i hope comes out of the budget process to make it less partisan when the results dont exist more than 30 days than reconciliation is the most important part and it has its shortcomings because every amendment has to have that budgetary impact so the rules that follow that make actual legislation very difficult if that is the only way to move forward then that is the method of choice i think there are better ways to legislate and hopefully we can get to that. I think we talked about assumptions mattered with all the different arrows that is event offered to explain verbally but the assumption is they do have a good ability to understand and that might make that transparency we are talking about for the non economist most everybody in the senate also i like the idea everything should be written in non swahili. [laughter] and have better titles that are not as biased getting people not to vote against them the matter how good they sound. And i appreciate your comment a lot of people can sit down with the analyst to get a better understanding where the information came from that would be very helpful. Thank you for being here today and your comments and we will continue to work with you to engage the community to do more oversight work not that we would legislate but the committees of jurisdiction. The hearing is concluded. People can turn in their list of questions if they wish and we will send those over to get a response. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] feedback i described it at a time it was a surprise that he is president to the United States here in the oval office so if he says you are you come here you dont ask. Drain the swamp i have three words it is incredibly provocative for what he is talking about with the notion that d. C. Was built on the swamp taking aim at these horrible people that live there with statute people that whether they believed him or not that he could fulfill that or not they were prepared to take a chance. By popular demand it is returning a coproduction with us in the National Constitution center when callers talk about race and the powers of congress constitution, immigration so was season to 12 landmark cases that take you through the history of the country to deal with these cases that really have something to do with today on the National Constitution center. We wanted to take cases with the Human Interest story because in the end they affect human beings across the country so do they have an impact do they change the court or the country and how relevant are they today . All of them. First is the power of congress to write the laws that Anthony Kennedy has mentioned many times on the Supreme Court that is about immigration we will have two very good guess onset in washington and also going to the places that help tell the story like San Francisco with the chinese laundromats or the civil rights cases overturned the 1875 law absences of dream court rule when jim crow went to effect Frederick Douglass makes an amazing speech one week afterwards we take you to that place. Youre on the set and interact with the audience but talk about how these are relevant today