W.H. rips GOP dynamic scoring rules

The White House ripped House Republicans on Tuesday for implementing new budget rules that look more favorably on tax cuts.

{mosads}Shaun Donovan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a blog post that the GOP’s move toward “dynamic” scoring would “risk injecting bias into a broadly accepted, non-partisan scoring process that has existed for decades.”

“As a result, it could allow Congress to adopt legislation that increases federal deficits, while masking its costs,” Donovan added.

The House voted Tuesday to require large pieces of fiscal legislation to receive a dynamic score – meaning Congress’s budget scorekeepers would seek to project whether those measures would spur economic growth, thus bringing in more revenue for the Treasury Department.

In his post, Donovan added that there’s no consensus among economists about how accurate dynamic scoring is, and insisted the new method would unfairly force the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation to make broad assumptions about the economy when scoring legislation. 

That’s why, Donovan said, CBO and JCT should continue to provide dynamic scores as supplementary materials for lawmakers considering legislation.

“While all budget estimates are uncertain, there is substantially more disagreement among economists and experts about how policy changes affect the macroeconomy than about most other scoring issues,” Donovan wrote.

Republicans are putting dynamic scoring into place at a time when House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) have called revamping the tax code a top priority. House Republicans said during Tuesday’s debate that there’s no certainty in any economic projection, and that dynamic scores will allow lawmakers to make more informed decisions about legislation.