CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE Statement of Alice M. Rivlin Congressional Budget Office before the Subcommittee on Legislative Appropriation Request for Fiscal Year 1984 (171) Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, I am pleased to present the fiscal year 1984 budget request for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). CBO serves the Congress as a nonpartisan analytical support agency. Its mandate is to provide the Congress with budget-related information and with analysis of fiscal, budgetary, and programmatic policies--both those already in place and potential alternatives. The office makes no recommendations of policy; its principal tasks are to present the Congress with options for consideration and to study the possible budgetary and economic ramifications of those options. BUDGET REQUEST This is an For fiscal year 1984, we are requesting $16,751,000. increase of $1,478,000 over CBO's anticipated fiscal year 1983 operating level. The number of staff positions is the currently authorized level of 222. No additional staff positions are being requested. I want to emphasize that this is a current services budget. The increment of $1,478,000 is made up of the following items: $892,000 for cost increases, systems maintenance, and new work relating to CBO's automatic data processing (ADP) operations; $268,000 for cost increases, modifications, and enhancements relating to our systems, data, and model development work; $213,000 for personnel costs, primarily for pay adjustments and related benefits; and $105,000 for cost increases relating to other administrative support services. I will discuss these areas in more detail later in this statement. First, however, I should like to review briefly for the Committee the principal services CBO provided to the Congress in the past fiscal year. CURRENT CBO SERVICES TO THE CONGRESS The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 as amended mandates that CBO carry out the following tasks: maintain current tabulations of Congressional revenue and spending actions (scorekeeping); prepare five-year cost estimates for authorizing bills; prepare outlay estimates for bills providing new budget authority; supply tax expenditure and revenue information; report annually projections of new budget authority, outlays, and revenues for the coming five fiscal years; estimate the costs to state and local government of carrying out or complying with federal legislation; prepare periodic forecasts of economic trends and alternative fiscal policies; and analyze issues that affect the federal budget. 11-489 O - 83 12 The provision of this information involves many different forms of work products ranging from staff memoranda, computer tabulations, and formal letter responses from the Director to published reports. As the demand for budget-related information has increased in recent years, the volume of CBO work products has grown markedly. Scorekeeping CBO provides the Congress with up-to-date tabulations of Congressional actions on revenue and spending bills. These tabulations are used, particularly by the Budget and Appropriations Committees, to measure the status of Congressional budget actions against the targets or limits specified in the concurrent resolutions on the budget. The bulk of CBO scorekeeping activities involve spending actions. The spending side of the federal budget is complex, consisting of more than 1,000 separate accounts. Furthermore, the Congress acts each year on a large number of individual legislative bills that affect spending, including 13 appropriation bills. CBO's scorekeeping system keeps track of Congressional action on all these bills from the time they are reported from committee to when they are enacted into law. As a result, the CBO scorekeeping data base for budget authority and outlays is very large and keeping it current is a major effort. |