Congress's Wonks Vs. the White House's: We Need Both

Has the day of the Congressional Budget Office come and gone? That’s the pronouncement of Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

You can think of the OMB as the Red Sox to the CBO’s Yankees. They're in the same league -- assessing the likely outcomes of proposed legislation -- but each team has its own style. (Players, however, may float from one team to another, as my Bloomberg View colleague Peter Orszag did from the CBO to the Obama White House.) The OMB is essentially a creature of the White House, which is to say, political. The CBO, on the other hand, stays so scrupulously out of politics that a running joke in Washington notes that its full name is the “nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office,” as journalists seem to automatically add the word.