Sponsors (2)
The bill speeds and expands committees' access to private budget scoring, but at the cost of reducing independent CBO authority, raising politicization and conflict-of-interest risks, and weakening transparency and public trust in budget estimates.
Federal appropriations committees and chair offices can hire large, established accounting firms to produce faster or alternative budget estimates (including for section 312(a) work), speeding legislative scheduling and giving committees more analytical options when drafting spending measures.
Taxpayers and Congress could lose access to independent, nonpartisan CBO scoring for measures that rely on outside firms, increasing the risk of biased or inconsistent cost estimates and weakening overall transparency and accountability in budget enforcement.
Smaller committees and minority members may have less confidence in budget estimates because majority chairs select private firms, raising the risk that analyses will favor sponsors' priorities and politicize scoring.
Limiting hires to the ten largest PCAOB-registered firms concentrates the pool of providers and may create conflicts of interest if those firms have business ties to entities affected by legislation, potentially harming taxpayers and small businesses.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Allows committee chairs to use budget estimates from top-10 PCAOB-registered private accounting firms in place of CBO estimates and bars CBO from preparing estimates for those measures.
Allows the chair of any House or Senate committee (except an Appropriations Committee) to hire a top-10 PCAOB-registered private accounting firm to produce a budget estimate for any reported public bill or resolution and to use that estimate in place of a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate. If a private firm estimate is obtained, the CBO is barred from preparing its own estimate for that measure. Also permits either Appropriations Committee to rely on such private-firm estimates for certain budget enforcement duties. The bill defines the allowable private firms as the ten PCAOB-registered public accounting firms with the largest net revenue in the prior year. The measure does not specify funding, timelines, or additional transparency requirements for private estimates.
Introduced March 31, 2025 by Claudia Tenney · Last progress March 31, 2025