Newt Gingrich: The CBO Needs to Go

The agency is consistently wildly inaccurate, with enormous policy ramifications.

by Newt Gingrich
March 18, 2017

The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of how the American Health Care Act will impact the economy and our insurance markets is simply absurd.

I told Martha MacCallum on Fox News the other night that the CBO should be abolished and replaced by three to five outside professional firms that better understand the dynamic interaction of legislation and the marketplace.

This prompted some liberals to claim I was only griping, because the bill – the first step toward repealing and replacing Obamacare – received a bad “score” from the budget office. The Left wants to create a false narrative that Republican opponents of the CBO are simply defending their party and president.

But these Democrats are reimagining history.

In fact, I have advocated replacing the CBO for more than a decade.

In my 2005 book Winning the Future, I argued that the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation should be replaced with an Accurate Scoring Caucus after the CBO inaccurately projecte…