Improving the Terms of Engagement
Weekly Lab Report – June 16, 2026
Fiscal Lab Notes is the official Substack page for the Fiscal Lab on Capitol Hill. You can check out all our work and analyses at fiscallab.org.
While Members of Congress set the terms of debate on Capitol Hill, the Fiscal Lab helps Members’ office understand the budgetary and economic issues the Members debate. Additionally, by offering tools and analysis to Members of Congress and their staff, the Fiscal Lab helps improve the terms of engagement—how Members, their Offices, and the two congressional entities responsible for scoring, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), speak with one another. Normally, our work is publicly invisible, but last week, Fiscal Lab’s contributions were noticed by the media.
A Possible Reconciliation 3.0
As reported by Politico, the influential Republican Study Committee hosted a meeting with several senior House lawmakers, CBO Director Phillip Swagel, JCT Chief of Staff Tom Barthold, and several outside groups, including the Fiscal Lab.
In recent years, dialogue between Members of Congress and CBO and JCT have often been less productive due to the official scoring bodies’ limited transparency about how they arrive at their cost estimates. In addition to offering lawmakers estimates of the fiscal cost of policies under consideration, Fiscal Lab also exists to help facilitate greater understanding and trust between lawmakers and the scoring agencies by performing analysis—especially focusing on the key analytical aspects of proposed legislation—and setting a higher standard in modeling transparency within our own work.
Last week’s meeting, reported by Politico, was a much more productive meeting than the conversations that were taking place at this time last year. For the Fiscal Lab to be so involved and helpful to such key meetings less than a year from our launch is truly remarkable. It is a testament to the quality of our work and our growing reputation among our core audience: Members of the House and Senate and their staff.
Independent Validation and Trust
Part of the reason for the growing trust in the Fiscal Lab is the quality of our work, and a great example of this was a small piece of legislation, which though important in the particulars, also served as both a demonstration of our modeling and a great example of the detail and analysis that makes the Lab’s work shine next to the work of CBO and JCT.
In early April, staff from the office of Rep. Lloyd Smucker (PA) asked the Lab for our views on the fiscal effects of their legislation (H.R. 2347) to remove the tax burden on sexual assault victims, who are awarded damages in litigation. Our analysis showed the legislation would have a fiscal effect of less than $100 million per year, and less than $1 billion over 10 years. Our score goes on to document the available data, from which the evaluation is made, limitations of the data, and source links that support Fiscal Lab’s analysis. This is typical of our work, and it’s not especially noteworthy.
What makes this work more noteworthy is that shortly after being asked for our views on the legislation—and before our scoring work was complete—the bill was marked-up out of committee and sent to the House floor for a vote. Consequently, this triggered a score release from CBO, which included work from JCT, and the result was that Fiscal Lab and CBO/JCT independently producing scores on the legislation, which were released within a day of each other. Both scores align with the fiscal cost being less than $100 million per year and less than $1 billion over 10 years.
The difference in the score was not in the numbers; it was in the analysis and the details. Unlike the Fiscal Lab analysis, the CBO/JCT data is presented without supporting documentation. Members and staff are left to take the score as credible just because CBO/JCT say so. In an era where trust is at a low ebb, providing more information and sourcing is critical to restore and build confidence in the halls of Congress and in the public more broadly.
And more often than not, it will hopefully be the case that Fiscal Lab and CBO/JCT scores align. Assuredly, there will be times when we do not align, but when that happens lawmakers will have full documentation and sourcing for how and why Fiscal Lab generated our scores. We want to set the standard for high quality, well-sourced work that helps to build trust so that we can have the critically important conversations necessary for improving our nation’s perilous fiscal condition.