The House is slated to vote this week on two GOP proposals to cut the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) funding and eliminate its Budget Analysis Division.
The two measures will likely be considered on Wednesday as amendments to a government spending package on the House floor this week.
Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration have been critical of the nonpartisan budget scorekeeper amid its repeated estimates that their efforts to repeal and replace ObamaCare would result in tens of millions more people without insurance.
{mosads}The House Rules Committee, which is controlled by the majority party leadership, decided late Tuesday night to allow the amendments to get consideration on the floor.
Both amendments are authored by members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
One amendment offered by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) would cut funding for the CBO by $25 million, out of its total $48.5 million appropriation.
The other, submitted by Reps. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Perry, would eliminate the CBO’s Budget Analysis Division and transfer its duties to the director’s office.
The Budget Analysis Division estimates the impact of legislation on the federal budget and produces baseline projections of federal spending.
A third amendment submitted by Perry, Jordan and Meadows did not get the green light from the Rules Committee to secure a floor vote.
That amendment would have also abolished the Budget Analysis division. It would have then substituted its responsibilities by ordering the CBO director to aggregate data compiled by think tanks including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.
“They’re the one group that makes a weatherman’s 10-day forecast look accurate,” Meadows said of the CBO at an event at the National Press Club on Monday.
Earlier this month, the White House produced a video attacking the CBO and accused it of using “faulty assumptions and bad numbers” to estimate the impact of the House and Senate GOP healthcare proposals.
The CBO estimated that the House measure would result in 23 million more uninsured people over the next decade, compared to the 22 million more uninsured by the Senate’s version. It also calculated that a standalone ObamaCare repeal would increase the number of uninsured people by 32 million in the same timeframe.