Does not compute

15 June 2017 By Gina Chon Follow @GinaChon

The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number-cruncher, wants a 7 pct funding bump. The Trump team doesn’t control that directly, but it isn’t giving other data agencies extra and it dislikes the CBO. It’s crucial, though, to a rational assessment of new legislation.

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The U.S. Congressional Budget Office requested a 7.4 percent budget increase for 2018 given the expected increase in workload due to bills on healthcare, tax reform and other matters, Director Keith Hall said in a statement to Congress on June 13. The increase would put the agency’s budget at nearly $50 million for fiscal year 2018.

Aides of President Donald Trump, including budget chief Mick Mulvaney, have questioned the CBO’s existence after the office showed that 23 million more people would be uninsured by 2026 under the American Health Care Act, passed last month in the House and under consideration in the Senate.

The CBO's budget falls within the congressional total, which although proposed by Congress has to be approved by Trump, who can veto it. The White House budget envisages an 11 percent decrease in the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s 2018 budget to $97 million, and flat funding for the Bureau of Labor Statistics at $608 million. The U.S. Census Bureau would receive a 7 percent increase to $1.5 billion.

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