The Congressional Budget Office is obsolete, and it will not work well with Donald Trump's presidency, according to Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House.
"The Congressional Budget Office is simply incompatible with the Trump era," Gingrich wrote on his website. "President-elect Trump won as an entrepreneurial change agent who would 'drain the swamp,' get Washington under control, take charge of the bureaucracies, and get things done in an entrepreneurial, common sense way.
"The Congressional Budget Office is the opposite of those commitments."
According to its website, "CBO has produced independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process."
Gingrich challenged that definition, saying, "It is a left-wing, corrupt, bureaucratic defender of big government and liberalism . . . in the four years I was Speaker of the House, CBO was consistently difficult to work with. If we hadn't fought with them constantly, we would never have balanced the budget."
The Affordable Care Act benefited from CBO's analyses improperly, Gingrich wrote, saying it used the act's architect to come up with CBO's score for the legislation he helped write.
"It was so wrong, it was totally indefensible," Gingrich wrote.
The former House speaker said CBO's "obsolete, inaccurate, and dishonest" bureaucracy would give negative scores to projects such as building the U.S.-Mexico border wall and returning to the moon.
He called for reforms including competitive bidding for every proposal, and transparency for how CBO grades.
A Jan. 17 report from CBO said repealing parts of the Affordable Care Act would increase the number of uninsured people by 18 million.
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