Answers to Questions for the Record Following a Hearing on CBO’s Appropriation Request for Fiscal Year 2023

On May 11, 2022, the Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch of the Senate Committee on Appropriations convened a hearing for which Phillip L. Swagel, the Congressional Budget Office’s Director, submitted a statement for the record about the agency’s appropriation request for fiscal year 2023.1 After the hearing, Ranking Member Braun submitted questions for the record. This document provides CBO’s answers. It is available at www.cbo.gov/publication/58224.

Question. As you know, in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, Congress provided strict instructions that unauthorized appropriations “shall” be submitted to Congress by January 15 of each year. While CBO did produce and post a spreadsheet to their website, the annual report has not been completed. Given that a majority of unauthorized appropriations are unidentifiable, we believe that this report, one of the few required by law, should be prioritized before other projects as listed in CBO’s work in progress update. Can you provide a date as to when this full report will be available?

Answer. CBO expects to release Expired and Expiring Authorizations of Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2022 on August 31, 2022. It will mostly reprise and summarize information contained in the spreadsheet the agency published, ahead of the statutory deadline, on January 14, 2022.2 That spreadsheet contained most of the information that usually accompanies the report—specifically, it identified all the authorizations, the relevant public laws, the amounts authorized, the expiration dates, the committees and appropriation subcommittees with jurisdiction, and other data. The forthcoming report will also show the amounts that were provided in appropriation acts for the current year for programs whose authorizations of appropriations have expired. Those amounts had not been determined when CBO published the earlier spreadsheet.

Question. It’s important that CBO provides accurate and timely information to Congress to inform decision making. How would the resources requested in your fiscal year 2023 budget improve CBO’s timeliness in producing reports?

Answer. The requested budget is based on the strong interest in CBO’s work that is expressed by Congressional leadership, committees, and Members. Responding to that interest strains the agency’s resources in many areas, and CBO cannot produce as many estimates and other analyses as leadership, committees, and individual Members request.

The budgetary increase that CBO is seeking would enable the agency to be more responsive to Congressional needs by fully funding the staffing increase that is under way this year and by funding seven new staff members. Four of those staff members would help the agency more quickly deliver additional analysis and more reports on topics such as health care, climate change, and energy policy. CBO anticipates that those topics will be of particular interest to the Congress and spur further legislative activity. Two staff members would support more senior analysts when demand surges for analysis of a particular issue or when additional assistance is needed for a complicated estimate or report. One staff member would assist CBO’s efforts in information technology.

The larger staff would allow CBO to have several people with overlapping skills who could work within and across teams. Those additional staff members would help the agency handle surges in demand for analysis of a particular topic or provide support when further assistance was needed for a complicated estimate or report. In some cases, those tasks would require expertise related to specific topics, and in other cases, they would require more technical expertise, such as the ability to design and improve simulation models.