About the u. S. Economic outlook iand the federal debt at an oversight hearing. Keith hall was asked about health care costs, immigration policy and government funding. He testified before the Senate Budget committee. I think this has the potential to get a lot of good information. Good morning and welcome to the Congressional Budget Office im proud to say this is the third such installment of the continued oversight under my chairmanship and im glad to see the House Budget Committee will follow the lead with additional oversight later this month. We have a congressional budget act that provides the committee with the authority to review the continuing basis by the Congressional Budget Office of its functions and duties. Present the opportunity to review the performance and served as the forum for discussing ways in which it can be more effective and attentive to the needs of congress. While improving its operations, the first director of the cbo instructed staff in the 1976 memo and said i work in the publications must always be balanced, thorough and free. More than 40 years Later Congress and other policymakers in thand the public still depenn cbo to provide objective, transparent and timely budgetary and economic analysis. One of the difficulties in the office of course is they have to forecast, and that is especially difficult when its about the future. We do want to have the best possible answers, and of course we always want them praised in our own way. Weve been exploring the request for morehe transparency, forgetting to see the model and i think we are also asking for the main assumption used to reach the conclusions. If the assumptions are good and pretty comprehensive, i think we will have more confidence in the results. This will be the first of many hearings thiss year in 201 2016e held 13 hearings to find a better way to budget. The ones i could do without legislation are done, the main one was to give the budget to the minority five days before the budget markup with amendments to be submitted early so that sidebyside could be developed and better yet ones that came from both sides of the aisle were similar amendments to get together for a better solution. I still have a lot of hope for that and anticipate doing that again. Now last year was a busy time for the committee and we approved two budget resolutions and facilitated transportation on the reconciliation bills one related to healthcare and one resulted in the tax reform legislation. This legislative activity in addition to all the other proposals considered considered but intense demands on cbo. In 2017 they produced more than 700 formal cost estimates, several thousand in the formal nearly 130 appropriation tabulations thats a lot of work for an agency about one tenth the size of 1 the office while i am appreciative of all of the hard work i also believe we must take the time to review these efforts we need to look back at what went right and also what may have gone wrong. The budget act lays out the mission in section 202 where we can read and it shall be the primary duty and function to provide to the committees on both houses information that will assist the committees and the discharge ofll all matters n their jurisdiction. This section refers to the cbo role in assisting and supporting the committees and members of the execution of their duties. Testifying before us today is the cbo director with all of the divisions that are tasked with producingei statutorily required forecasts, thousands of cost estimates and proposed legislation and special reports as requested by congress. Cbo budget analysis is an integral part of the process. When you last appeared before the committee in september, 2016 to discuss operations and gave an update on the agencys progress towards several important goals in support of recent legislative initiatives to increase the transparency of the Agency Analysis and operations and the responsiveness to congressional needs. Im interested in learning how the views regarding modeling transparency and ways the agency can more clearly communicate the methods, assumptionsy and data that underlined the budget analysis. I also welcome your thoughts on how we can more efficiently allocate the existing resources including staff responsibilities to satisfy these congressional requests and expectations. In 2018 and beyond we continue to play a key role in supporting congress as we consider the budget and economic effects of the proposed legislation, its objectivity, transparency and the timeliness is essential to help Congress Make informed decisions. Just as the role of the federal budget process crucial so too with the statutory responsibility to oversee cbo. I would like to have thank you for joining us today. Senator sanders. I think before we do oversight it might be a good idea to do oversight of this committee. Itit might be a good idea for te Budget Committeea to actually produce a budget and i know that is a radical idea that maybe that is what we want to do 116 days into the fiscal year to do something more than give a short term budget resolution. The truth is has any business person in america will tell you, you cant run any kind of entity on a monthtomonth basis. We are a 4 trilliondollar entity that is what the United States government is. There are some agencies clearly that needs more funding and some that need less funding and the idea that we are saying every agency every month is going to get the same amount as they previously thought. We will find we are wasting tens and tens of billions of dollars of funding agencies that are clearly inefficient so we are not addressing that. Mr. Chairman, it says to me that we have got to address the role in pushing our colleagues forward on this thing and we have got to address the budget crisis that we have. Some of the issues we are all familiar with that have got to be addressed as we desperately try to come up with the 2018 annual budget. I think history will look back at this particular moment and see an incredible moral stain about doing this to these younger people. Another is a great desire to see more defense than we can argue about that but the bottom line is for every dollar that we spend on defense, weve got to spend on the needs of working families. Three or four years of age are being impacted by the opioid crisis. Kids are being taken out of their homes. Have a crisis. We are not dealing with a crisis. Unbelievably, unbelievably mr. Chairman. Wele have not reauthorized the committee. Fullstop and, we have 30,000 vacancies at the veterans administration. 10,000 people with disabilities died last year while they were submitting claims to the Social Security administration doesnt have the staff or the funding to process both. Are we going to adequately fund the administration a pass another continuing resolution leaving them mostly underfunded. There are enormous needs facing the American People and they are not just getting tax breaks to fillonaires are trying to 30 Million People. Theres a number of notations and we will have more hearings during this year. There are committees interested in pursuing in some depth as kind of a task force for oversight. Since this time he has appeared before the committee to discuss the cbos work and projections for the nations fiscal situation. Its with george mason university, the bureau of labor statistics with the White House Council of economic advisers with the department of commerce and International Economists for the itc. The assistantnt professor at the university of arkansas and department of treasury and worked with a wide variety of topics including labor Market Analysis and policy conditions and measurements and macroeconomic analysis. Equilibrium and modeling which i hope you wont explain this morning. The masters of economics from Purdue University and this morning doctor hall will be working over the last year. Director hall will take up seven minutes followed by questions. Welcome and please begin. Thank you for inviting me here to discuss the work of the Congressional Budget Office. As you know the mission is providing them on purpose in analysis to support the work of the committee and congress aseea whole. We are devoted to the commission and i appreciate the opportunity to discuss how we plan to expand the work in the future. I want to take the opportunity to support your guidance weve long relied on the committee to explain to others in the congress with the role is to provide constructive feedback and how we can serve congress to provide guidance and with the congress priorities are. That has been the key to the success over the years and in the past year weve provided congress with 740 cost estimates and mandatess statements and weve also provided thousands of hours of Technical Assistance to the committees which have included thousands of informal cost estimates probably more work than the formal cost estimates. 128 scorekeeping tabulations and analytical reports and working papers, dozenss of files in budget and economicec projectios and numerous other publications. Many of the cost estimates were produced under very tight time constraints requiring extraordinary efforts by the staff to meet legislative deadlines. We also undertake new initiatives to enhance the responsiveness and transparency and we reorganized ther work process in the high demand and we publish more and projections about the economy, spending and Health Insurance subsidies. In the cost estimates for many proposals including legislation reported by the committees. Other major parks would include a volume of policy options that would reduce the budget deficit, reports in the longterm budget outlook, and i was as if the budget proposals and in the policy analyses on a broad range of topics and interest congressional committees. We are reviewing and updating every aspect of its simulation model of Health Insurance coverage which forms the backbone of the budget projections related to the federal healthcare spending for people younger than 65 and in addition further developing the capabilities to process the economic effects of the fiscal policies and in the way that changes federal regulations agencies based one projections. For the searc the searches and d the particular issues. I like to think of this as documenting the process models. The ways in which a proposal might assess which of them would substantiale effects. The models are just a few of the tools we use in producing the estimates. Within the range of the senate and House Appropriations committees have recommended. If we receive the funding available in the resolution currently in effectai this yeare will make less progress. Moreover, the ability to buy the data and research for other activities would be severely limited under the funding specified in the continuing resolution agencies perform the mission. They could be undertaken only if the cbo had more employees. Without review tv reducing the current staffing level. Its also to expand the capability by allowing new healthcare analysts. Im happy to meet with members of the congress with a chat on the phone and in addition we meet frequently with staff to explain the analysis and answer questions individually and in groups. We have plans to be in better contact. For instance earlier this month in collaboration with the Research Service they gave presentations to 150 Congressional Staff members about how they develop estimates of Health Insurance costs and coverage. I welcome your suggestions. Now we will turn to questions let me take a moment to explain the process each member will have five minutes and then senator sanders following the two of us we will alternate questions between the republicans and minority. All members in attendance when the hearing started will be recognized in order of seniority on their side. For those that arrived after the hearing began you are on the list and its your turn to be on the list to be recognized you move to the bottom of the list and turned to the next senator to ask questions. With that, i have a few questions. A recent legislative proposal introduced in the house and senate would require them to publicly disclose the data you mentioned that in your testimony the intent of the legislation is to increase transparency and allow for outside analysts to reproduce and replicate cbo projectionsoj while youve made significant strides to open up the work toif the public but efforts are currently underway to increase the transparency further for the congress and the public. Transparencyted to and weve certainly been trying to increase transparency. Theres different ways of being transparent with different benefits to congress and the different costs with respect toh benefits who would direct transparency to the members or staff. And then of course cost. There can be became time and resources used to become more transparent. One of the things we are doing for example is a complete rewrite of the main model for doing healthcare insurance estimate. The rewrite will happen over the next year, but to give you the idea, we have plans since ive been on board to completely redo this model so its been three years. We would have been finished by now its over the past year we hadnt gotten so many healthcare related requests for the same people updating the model for wh the same doing cost estimates. That is my next question is one complaint i often hear from colleagues as they are unable to receive estimates on the legislation in a timely manner but cbo has plenty of time to release other products and reports. How would you respond to that complaint are they the result of congressional requests or agency initiated, can you provide a list of reports that did not originate due to the specific request are not directly attributed to a single requesting office . You first expressed concern about that. Wewe havent started the report since ive been a director having specific congressional interest from a committee with jurisdiction so we simply dont do the analytical reports just on our own. We square that away first. We have time for other people working on the reports. They all interfere with work on cost estimate estimates for exai work on the developing models for cost estimates into that sortg of thing. How do you prioritize those requests . We get way more work than we can possibly handle so what we do is look to the committees of jurisdiction and ask them what are their priorities and we follow their priorities. One of the more frustrating to do when i have get calls from members sometimes have a piece of legislation they would like to look at if we are really busy with Committee Work we have to ask can we make this a priority and often times the answer is no. We are trying to take direction from committees on how to protect resources. Theres a chairman of the Budget Committee to have more of a role in that. My time has expired so i will turn over to senator sanders. As we contemplate passing a budget. One is equal funding for defense and if i am correct the next three budgets that would pass so had. He is a cornerstone is that correct . By republican colleagues have spent a lot of time this year on healthcare and if my recollection is correct, your agency has been criticized a bit for the analysis that they provided us on various health care proposals. So lets go over this again because i think the consensus is that you are right and urinalysis. There should be a truth in advertising. Cbo found that 32 million fewer people after ten years. Its also relative to the baseline. May 24, they scored the American Health care act as passed by the house. 23 million fewer people with Health Insurance after ten years does that sound about right . They made the obvious conclusion that when you substantially cut federal funding on healthcare low and behold i think you came up with the obvious Congress Version you were criticized and i think that iss unfortunate. After trying to throw tens of millions of Health Insurance by republican colleagues took a look at taxes in the United States. The legislation that was finally passed would add more than 1. 7 trillion to the deficit when interest costs are includ included. Am i correct in saying the analysis determined that the legislation is that a fair representation . They after day and month after month. November 8, cbo estimated the effects of repealing the Affordable Care act or socalled individual mandate so they estimated the change would increase the numbervi of peopley 13 million within ten years and increase premiums by about 10 in any given year. It would actually save the government 6 million. Does that sound about right . Yes it does. Let me just conclude by saying i think under a lot of pressure your agency is trying to do the objective work that is expected of you and i hope they would refrain from attacking the agency because the results that you produce are not some comfortable. Thank you mr. Chairman. Doctor hall, i want to get to the line of questions the chair and waswa engaged in in terms of who decides which you score. The reason im asking the questions after the election knowing we are going to be bringing up health care, i did testing scores on what would have been if we repealed market reforms. Didnt get very far so on march 23, 2017 i sent a letter to you sent by the chairman and 20 of my other colleagues requesting the Congressional Budget Office in consultation with the taxation estimate the budgetary effect of repealing the obamacare insurance regulation. Understand what policy might cause. Why didnt we ever get that score. This is four months before this came to head. The only response we got this i cant do it. Now you do all kinds of different things, all kinds of investments. Its simple why didnt we get an answer 22 republican senators asked for this analysis what would it cost the government if we repealed tho