# Plain Language Summary: CBO Show Your Work Act

Right now, when Congress considers a new law, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzes how much it will cost and what effects it might have on the economy, jobs, and society. The problem is that the CBO keeps most of its work behind closed doors. They publish their final estimates, but they don't usually share the detailed calculations, computer models, and assumptions they used to reach those conclusions. This bill would change that by requiring the CBO to open up their playbook and show everyone exactly how they arrived at their numbers.

Under this law, the CBO would have to release all the computer programs, data sets, and mathematical models they use to calculate how legislation affects the budget and economy. They'd need to provide enough detail that outside experts—economists, researchers, or anyone with the technical skills—could actually recreate their analysis from scratch and verify whether their conclusions are correct. Think of it like a recipe: instead of just telling you the final dish tastes good, they'd have to give you every ingredient and step so you could make it yourself and taste it too. For sensitive information that can't be publicly released for privacy or security reasons, the CBO would still have to describe what data they used and provide contact information for anyone who could access it.

The practical impact is that this bill aims to increase transparency and accountability in how Congress evaluates the costs of new laws. It would let independent experts, think tanks, and the public scrutinize the CBO's work and potentially challenge their estimates if they disagree with the methodology. This could lead to more informed debates about legislation, though it might also slow down the CBO's work since they'd need to spend time preparing all this material for release. Ultimately, it's about making sure that when Congress votes on a bill based partly on the CBO's cost estimates, those estimates are open to public inspection and verification rather than treated as a black box.

CBO Show Your Work Act

Davidson, Warren

CBO Show Your Work Act This bill requires the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to make available to Congress and the public each fiscal model, policy model, and data preparation routine that the CBO uses to estimate the costs and other fiscal, social, or economic effects of legislation. For each estimate of the costs and other fiscal effects of legislation, the CBO must also disclose, in a manner sufficient to permit replication by individuals not employed by the CBO, the data, programs, models, assumptions, and other details of the computations used to prepare the estimate. For data that may not be disclosed, the CBO must make available to Congress and the public <ul> <li> a complete list of all data variables for the data; </li> <li> descriptive statistics for all data variables for the data, to the extent that the descriptive statistics do not violate the rule against disclosure; </li> <li> a reference to the statute requiring that the data not be disclosed; and </li> <li> contact information for the individual or entity who has unrestricted access to the data. </li> </ul>