The CBO must be disbanded Immediately!

In a May 11 letter to Rep. Jerry Lewis, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf retracted his previous estimate of the cost of the health-care overhaul, and conceded that 'discretionary spending could add another $115 billion-plus to the 10-year cost of Obamacare.

Naturally, the CBO has offered up a lame excuse to explain the discrepancy between its latest estimate and the one it used prior to the passage of the health care bill. But it is quite obvious the CBO is nothing more than an arm of the Democratic Party whose sole purpose is to facilitate the Liberal, Left-Wing agenda of the President and his like-minded allies in Congress.

In November of 2009, I cited a post from Verum Serum who went into detail describing the intimate connection that exists between the White House and the past and present leadership of the CBO. Additionaly, Verum Serum noted that Douglas Elmendorf - the purported non-partisan and impartial CBO Director - co-authored a paper, in 2008, extolling the benefits of “establishing universal health insurance”.

From the Verum Serum blog:

The current Director of the CBO is Douglas Elmendorf, a highly-regarded, Harvard trained economist. As you may know, the CBO Director who preceded Elmendorf was Peter Orszag, who now heads up the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Both Elmendorf and Orszag were senior fellows at the Brookings Institution prior to joining the federal government, but they share something else in common as well.

As it turns out, Orszag was the founding director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings, a multi-year research initiative focused on economic policy to “benefit more Americans”. When Orszag left Brooking for the CBO in early 2007, economist Jason Furman took over the reigns of the Hamilton Project. Furman departed in June 2008 when he accepted a position as director of economic policy for the Obama campaign. Who took over for Furman? If you guessed Doug Elmendorf, then you are correct.

Notably, healthcare reform was a significant focus of the Hamilton Project. Furman ultimately authored a book (Who Has the Cure? Hamilton Project Ideas on Health Care), and Elmendorf co-authored a paper with Furman which argued the benefits of “establishing universal health insurance”.

So you have three successive directors of a liberal-leaning policy initiative. Two of them are now very close economic advisers to the President. Orszag at the OMB, and Furman who is now Deputy Director of the National Economic Council. And then you have Douglas Elmendorf in charge at the CBO....

Which is why I strongly believe that the CBO must be disbanded immediately! Truth be told, it should have been disbanded long before congress voted on the health care bill.

Special Interests - although they may be dutifully facilitating Barack Obama's left-wing agenda - should not be running a non-partisan congressional office - especially when they've advocated on behalf of the very piece of legislation whose costs they've been tasked to assess .