Transparency at CBO: Future Plans and a Review of 2018
Report
In 2018, CBO continued to bolster its efforts to be transparent. This report fulfills CBO’s requirement to provide plans for future transparency efforts within 90 days of the enactment of its appropriation for 2019.
CBO’s transparency efforts aim to promote a thorough understanding of its work, help people gauge how estimates might change if policies or circumstances differed, and enhance the credibility of its analyses and processes. This document fulfills CBO’s requirement to report on its plans for such efforts.
The agency intends to undertake many additional steps next year, including the following:
Publish more overviews and documentation of some of its major models and more detailed information, including computer code, underlying key aspects of those models;
Update its template for cost estimates to make important information easier to find and read; and
Continue to evaluate previous estimates, when possible, in order to improve future ones.
Those efforts will build on progress made this year, which included creating several interactive products, publishing information about important models, publishing analyses of the accuracy of estimates, and producing reports explaining processes.