Republicans are trying to preemptively smear the Congressional Budget Office.

Follow this authorCatherine Rampell's opinions

The questionnaire, whose existence was previously reported by Politico, was distributed as a Google form. The version I obtained through a congressional staffer includes leading questions such as, “Do you believe the CBO needs to be audited?” and “please provide an anecdote of when CBO was UNHELPFUL.” (It then asked for an anecdote for when CBO was helpful.)

It also asks of those who describe the agency as “unsatisfactory” or “failing” to identify the agency’s “biggest problem.” The first suggested option? “Perceived bias.”

To be clear, the CBO has gotten things wrong before. It has excellent, hard-working staffers who produce objective analyses, but forecasting is an inherently fraught business. That’s especially true given the constraints the agency faces. Deadlines are tight. Congress also generally requires the CBO’s budget forecasts to assume current law continues as written, even when lawmakers openly plan to re-up expensive measures (or repeatedly delay the start of unpopular tax increases).

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But the idea that the CBO is somehow politically biased against Republicans is laughable. Its current director, Phillip Swagel, is a Republican who was selected partly by GOP congressional leadership and previously served in the George W. Bush administration. More importantly, the CBO’s staffers are nonpartisan civil servants with expertise in their fields, and they use the most up-to-date economic research and government data to produce the best estimates possible.

Lots of outside organizations produce their own estimates for the costs and economic impacts of bills, but the CBO’s numbers are the ones that officially matter for legislative procedure. For that reason, the agency has occasionally taken flack when its numbers proved politically inconvenient for Republicans, such as when it found that a repeal of Obamacare would cause millions of people to lose their insurance or that higher immigration levels have likely boosted economic growth. But, usually, the blowback just........

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