In a memo to staff, CBO's founding director, Alice Rivlin, emphasized the importance that the agency's work is objective, impartial, and nonpartisan.
CBO takes many steps to ensure that its work is objective, impartial, and nonpartisan. The agency must be—and must be perceived to be—objective and free from political bias and involvement. Therefore, for most positions at CBO, a person's fitness to perform the relevant duties is determined, in part, by whether that person can perform those duties in an objective, nonpartisan way while being perceived to be free from political bias and involvement. The agency enforces strict rules that prevent employees from having financial conflicts of interest and that limit their political activities.
All of the agency's products undergo rigorous review by people at different levels of the organization and are developed within an analytic framework that requires consistency among those products. CBO's projections of spending and revenues need to be consistent with its economic projections (and vice versa). Cost estimates and analytic reports must be consistent with the budget and economic projections. Using an interdependent framework with a common set of projections helps ensure that the agency's cost estimates and other assessments are analytically consistent.
Furthermore, CBO's reports are reviewed by outside experts who specialize in the topic at hand. Those outside experts represent a variety of perspectives. Members of the agency's panels of advisers account for just a subset of such experts. In choosing members of those panels and in weighing their input, CBO follows the long-standing practice of considering whether members and potential members are engaged in substantial political activity or have significant financial interests that might influence, or might reasonably appear to influence, their perspective on the topics about which CBO is seeking their advice. Although the agency draws on many outside experts, its findings are based on its own assessments, and CBO is solely responsible for them.
Finally, CBO makes no policy recommendations because choices about public policy inevitably involve value judgments that the agency does not and should not make.